Caleston Wake
by goblinballadeer
Summary: A member of the famous asari unit, the Serrice Guard, is imprisoned at an illegal krogan mining operation while investigating conspiracies in the wake of the Reaper War. The story involves original characters set in the Mass Effect universe shortly after events in Mass Effect 3. It is a complete story, but intended to be the first part of a trilogy. Some story arcs are ongoing.
1. Chapter 1

**Caleston Wake**

The yellow moon was a tiny, spinning dot against the backdrop of an exploited giant. Its features, aside from craters and dried up ammonia riverbanks, were the dozens of habitats where the brave and desperate made homes as miners, prospectors, and criminals. Most buildings were small. Dots on a dot.

One overlooked limestone moguls. It was larger than most, the inhabitants feared. The scavenged steel and prefab plastic coverings stretched a hundred meters across the moon. If you looked closely, under the incidental camouflage of shoddy repairs and modifications, you might recognize a square-shaped building. Two squares, actually, joined by umbilical tubes of scarred polypropylene. The largest habitat on Yagi, it had been rebuilt and repurposed countless times by bandits who knew far more about using hammers against the heads of hapless victims than for any constructive pursuit, and so had achieved for themselves an unsightly cocoon that festered on a scar dug into the moon. Whoever originally built the habitat, explorers or prospectors, had abandoned the facility long ago to the sort of people who mistook the function of hammers. Slavers and slaves. Outlaws and victims. Those were the only sort left to call the old mining station home.

The air inside grew staler with each new slave brought in to partake of breath. Sodium dust and lime deposits found their way into every corner and cranny. Given the maze of corners that existed, it spoke to the ambition of dust.

Tunnels branched across, upward, down into the earth, and criss-crossed with one another in maddening confusion. Clusters of exhausted men, faces dirty and fingers bloodied, dwelled in these tunnels because there was no room left for them in the cargo holds. Their tunnels were decorated with broken trinkets. Such men might have tools, or as likely be robbed by rival work crews, and seem more like squatters than laborers. Other tunnels ended abruptly at the site of archaic machinery chugging at their tasks, or led to no prize, baffling and purposeless.

Most people lived in the tunnels of Building B. Only a few lucky individuals claimed accommodations along a wall where they might catch a glimpse of the outside and they guarded their turf jealously. Falindra Deltos had not seen sky in two weeks. No sun or horizon or reminder of any universe that existed beyond the confines of the two conjoined buildings.

Two weeks doesn't sound long. It becomes aeons when you're denied sunlight. But she had endured the time, finding comfort in knowing her luck might have been worse. It was a stretch of a morbid imagination to think of how.

She sat in the safety of shadow, apart from the other captives, mulling over her plans and how they'd gone awry until a prolonged chorus of hollers and shouted goading, disturbed her thoughts. She followed the noise from one tunnel to another until it opened into the largest room she'd so far seen.

Enormous industrial drills perched against the southern wall of the room, awaiting operation, when they'd crack chunks of ice brought in from Kobayashi's fifth ring. Automated claw shuttles funnelled chunks of ice from the gas giant's orbit. At present, the drills were motionless and silent, peering over the ring of gathering miners with conical, menacing points.

Slaves, mostly human and salarian, gathered together in a ring of thirty to watch the chief entertainment available: fights. The Drau kept vorcha foot soldiers. Useful cannon fodder in a battle, they satiated their aggression upon one another if no bigger fight was available. What Falindra witnessed hardly matched her definition of a fight, more of a lynching. Four of the vorcha had turned against one of their own and beat him. Their claws drew blood freely and the bestial creatures showed little sense of restraint. .

The defender, his hide a deep brown with streaks of yellow across the shoulders, kept his back to the nearest conveyor belt. He shrieked and hissed, arms flailing and parrying the worst of the blows. The aggressors punched and clawed and kicked and bit. Rows of fangs dug deep into sinew, turning the rich, brown hide black from the bodily fluids seeping out of the wounds. The slave laborers who watched this pummeling enjoyed a sadistic, if fleeting thrill of revenge watching one of their wardens abused. Inevitably, one of them would face a similar lashing for some arbitrary infraction.

A gun blast boomed through the air, ending the fight. One of the krogan waded through the audience, shoving the human and salarian audience aside, until he waded into the ring of brawlers. The slaves gave him a wide berth without fuss for fear that the shotgun used to attract their attention, would only point skyward the first time. It surprised Falindra that first shot had not already been fired in a less civilized direction, eviscerating one among the hapless throng. Krogan niceties were a strange art.

"Stupid vorcha," screamed Drau Gorba. "You're going to damage the conveyor belts." The bulging, overweight krogan kicked and shoved the vorcha apart, not sparing the victim of the swarm attack.

"Me not stupid," the dark vorcha sulked, limping away.

Talking back proved a mistake. Gorba found it unforgivable. "Stupid enough to talk back," he spat and kicked the mongrel hard. Even from the entrance, Falindra heard the cracking sound as ligaments snapped.

The slaves retreated, ashamed of the carnage they'd cheered for now that it became an excess. Others feared that Gorba might discipline them. Some of them scrambled toward the mess hall. The rest headed in Falindra's direction for the tunnels.

She retreated, having no taste for witnessing the disciplinary whips and fists thrown about as ironic punishment for the unsanctioned use of whips and fists. She had gone to see if an event might prove noteworthy, because making mental notes had been her sole preoccupation since becoming a captive on Yagi.

She had suspected her journey might lead her into the Caleston Rift. Despite the scattering of legitimate settlements and turian military outposts, the cluster lost its largest colonies to the devastation of the Reaper invasion. Its star systems had since become plagued with pirates and helium-3 cartels spawning underworld empires. She foresaw needing to journey here. Being drugged and abducted, though, had not been the travel arrangements she wanted.

She strode through the another tunnel, before turning left into one more, unconsciously winding her way back to where she'd been nesting. She moved gingerly past the abode of Hastings's gang in what had once been a cargo room. The man led a motley group of humans, stranded fringe merchants, once selling supplies to the Dread Claw, now dependent on the krogan gang's mercies as a host. When they saw Falindra first arrive they immediately 'fancied' her. Ravishing an asari became a prized conquest for the group of men. They watched her movements closely, the length and shape of her body, and when she roamed the tunnels alone. They thought to follow her once. She had delivered three cracked ribs and two broken noses before the disturbed hunger in their eyes ebbed away. They had not tried following her since.

Hastings McCara glared at her f the cargo room entrance, his face punctuated by a jagged scar running across his right cheek. His eyes held the mixture of respect, fear, and hate that comes with trying to deduce your rank in the predator pack. If he'd possessed any dignity before arriving on Yagi, it had long since faded into oblivion.

His pants pockets were ripped. Falindra's fingers tore them open when they'd grappled and she overheard him complaining about the lost contents ever since. It made her smile, his complaints.

Technically, Hastings and his crew weren't even slaves. They'd begun as ice traders, 'licensing' rights with local gangs on Yagi to export some of the ice being mined from Kobayashi's rings. Independent ice trading operations of his sort were hazardous. Aside from requiring the wits to survive dealing with the sorts of gangs that find services with independent ice traders, useful, and aside from the regular perils of space travel, rogue merchants saw their freighters break down so often than turning a profit became a hazardous gamble. The only chance for real fortune lay in hearing about a colony facing disaster, such as contaminated water supplies, then being the first merchant to arrive, smiling as heroes to the rescue and shaking hands on a deal to sell exorbitantly priced water. Gleeful is the ice trader's smile when he hears that famine has struck a world.

Hastings had not been lucky enough to come to someone else's rescue. His thirty year-old freighter's air rectifier had broken down. No air, no travel, it doesn't matter how fast your engines will accelerate. The Drau charged handsomely for requested spare parts, and handsomely again for food that Hastings's crew ate in the meantime. Slaves ate for free, but independent merchants often gave each bit of coinage they earned to keep their bellies peaceful. It grew hard on Yagi to distinguish the man who possessed liberty and the man who went without.

Falindra crawled into the crevice she'd called home these past four days (since a hardy batarian judged her last locale as choice real estate; she chose eviction over another confrontation hours after fending off Hastings's crew). She'd secured a blanket from one of the krogan, Mar, who deemed an asari as prize property that warranted survival amenities. A salarian who claimed squatters rights nearby gave her an appraising look, perhaps deciding whether or not she might be worth thieving from while she slept, or if her designs on him were the same. They exchanged glances in the dim of fluctuating, broken lights. Then he turned away, rolling into tattered sheets on the ground.

She sat legs stretched out, pulled the blanket to her knees, and retrieved the morsel of bread she'd hidden in her pocket during lunch. It hadn't been extra rations or stolen fare, simply part of the day's meal. But eating in the public mess, wondering which fellow diner might bring blades to bear, strained her digestion. The habitat felt more like prison than slave camp. She preferred to eat in the comfort of solitude, ruminating. None of the slaves liked Hastings, but the news of her victory against his gang had not won her any friends. The human slaves kept to themselves. Same with the salarians. A pair of asari was among the ranks, but Falindra had not approached them so far.

After she ate, she prayed.

Once she finished praying, she decided to wander. The heat regulators on the ice drill had broken down again, and until the krogan had the devices fixed, the slaves were free to wander. Most of them chose to amble far away from the krogan and vorcha whose tempers soured when circumstances gave more work to them and less to the slaves. Drau Bodix, the krogan group's chief, permitted this freedom. After all, to escape the segmented, oblong-shaped habitat was to enter the lethal cold of outside where, weather aside, the radiation from Kobayashi promised agony within hours. Patrolling krogan and vorcha made certain that slaves and miners did not kill one another in irreplaceable numbers, or sneak into one of the few off-limits locations: the krogan bunks, security room, and vehicle bay. Beyond these limitations, Falindra felt free to roam.

Prayer and the opportunity to think over food had been exactly what she needed. It gave her time to consider her predicament. Strategize. That's what she needed to do. The bewilderment and fright of her means of arriving had kept her from thinking clearly.

The habitat was dilapidated, a collection of broken metal tiles, jutting rebar, potholes, and jutting rebar. The Dread Claw was the latest in a gang who occupied the decades old site. The place still functioned, still supported life. Its rundown condition was undeniable, but breathable air gusted through vents, outside radiation stayed at bay, livable temperature maintained warmth.

Who fixed the broken machinery? The krogan of Clan Drau rallying under the flag of the Dread Claw gang, were unlikely to count mechanical engineers among their rank and file, none that she had noticed. Their vorcha lackeys, full of fangs and tempers, were not brought into the gang for their technical prowess.

She folded the blanket and carefully hid it under a square of ripped sheet metal and refuse, then ventured toward one of the downward sloping tunnels, on the hunt for whoever kept the habitat operational. It had not been her intention to come upon the pirate base how she had, but she had plans to move forward, someone to rescue and another to kill.

The tunnel extended underground, reaching into the perpetual hum of rusted air filtration systems. The tunnel threatened a cave-in. Every machine gave the cantankerous growl of disjointed cogs. Falindra roamed further downward, an archeologist in the catacombs, gingerly maneuvering around clumps of refuse on the floor, broken rebar drooping from the ceiling: the stalagmites and stalactites of an artificial cave.

She chose one path when she came to a fork. Bits of metal shaken loose from traffic above dusted her head. The tunnel ended abruptly where its doorway collapsed. She turned back from another route when the sound of snivelling vorcha growls approached. Each time, though, another fork and route presented itself. She accepted the chance of getting lost without fear. Sooner or later she has to learn her way around the labyrinth.

After twenty minutes she reached a part of the sub-level where snakes of ceramic tubes met at the secondary power router.

The man who monitored the control systems was an unexpected figure: a bulbous, squat shaped volus. Falindra took measured steps toward him, allowing footfalls to carry noise as courtesy, a declaration that she'd not come to surprise him, knife in hand. With luck, it was the volus she'd been hoping to find. She'd been sidetracked by the betrayal that saw her stripped of supplies and sold into slavery.

The volus turned and stumbled back into his two-foot high workbench, jarring it hard enough that a pair of tools fell to the ground.

"Didn't mean to startle you," she said.

"You didn't," he responded, surly. "I simply hadn't expected, well…," his breathing apparatus hissed. "You're not the usual sort I've grown accustomed to seeing down here."

They took the moment to gauge one another. His self-enclosed environmental suit was dark emerald green with silver trimming, which Falindra decided looked quite regal, if he'd wipe away the layers of dirt and silicate.

On his part, the volus considered the lithe, feminine form in front of him. Asari possessed the uncanny ability to be physically appealing to other species, a trait the scientist in him catalogued as curious. She had a small, smart face and round mouth. Lilac-colored lines arced across her temples, accenting the blue skin.

She tilted her head in ceremonial greeting and extended her hand. His yellow lenses stared back. She wondered if his hidden eyes were as unblinking. He turned away, ignoring the offered hand, and bent low until his belly scraped the ground, retrieving the fallen tools.

"I've no time for visitors. Please go away. I can't help you."

Falindra stood flummoxed. "What makes you think I came begging for favors? And if I did, how do you know they're not in your power to provide? Maybe I simply wanted to meet someone who doesn't look ready to stab me."

Tools in hand, the volus stood straight once more. "Well we both know the falsehood in that. As for help, I imagine you want what everybody wants: help escaping. Let me assure you that whatever machinery I've access to, whatever privileges the krogan grant me for my services, I'm not privy to the shuttles or freighters or some secret, magical FTL engine."

Falindra smiled. "Sir, you needn't worry. I'm definitely not looking to escape. Not yet."

The green-suited volus gave her a long, measured stare. Not for the first time, Falindra resented the species' ability to conceal expressions behind their pressure suits, the hide intentions she deciphered from a twitch to the eye, an unconscious grimace. Then again, with little knowledge about the stubby race's natural appearance, it might be that his expressions proved impossible to interpret even if nakedly exposed.

"I don't know which troubles brought you here, miss, but I fear more the ones you're courting. I'd thank you to keep me out of your schemes."

"That's the second time you've accused me of something unkind within the minute. I know a person's got to be guarded in this place, but you might consider a kinder greeting."

Waiting for a response, she surveyed the room: a large maintenance area with the service tunnel running through it. No privacy, save for the fact that nobody else seemed interested in lurking, at least this moment. Krogan and vorcha wandered (she refused to call it 'patrol', since the taskmasters lacked proper security discipline) to deter any schemes from the other residents. Tubes bracketed into the ceiling and walls creaked with the pressure of gas vapors being pushed into power supplies or jettisoned outside. Spouts of steam shot from leaks in corroded pipe, criss-crossing the tunnel beyond.

"I'm a practiced observer of empirical detail, miss…." She offered her name. "Miss Falindra. I caught sight of you the day that slave trader bartered with the Drau, trading you for a half-charged helium-3 cell. The same day Hastings and his men accosted you and lost."

"Had to defend myself," Falindra responded, matter-of-fact. She smelt a fungal aroma in the air.

"True, but you courted the attack. I saw you provoking his interest, insulting him in front of his old crew. You wanted the fight. And I'm concerned why. There are easier ways – and easier people to assault – simply to make a statement when you first arrive. Most people are too frightened to consider making a statement at all."

"You read too much into my having poor control of my temper. I responded in kind." The fungal smell, though not entirely, displeasing, grew stronger. She scanned for its source.

"Each human male has twice the weight on me," she continued. "Even if I wanted a fight, it'd be absurd against those odds."

The volus chortled and stepped closer, pointing a single, pudgy finger, toward her arm. "That tattoo below your left shoulder is for the Asari Navy. The one below that indicates service with the warship, Nefrane. And on your right arm, if I'm not mistaken, are the membership markings of the Serrice Guard. Absurdity is the idea that you lost control of your temper. Or ever feared harm brawling disgruntled smugglers."

Falindra studied him, coolly. The dwarfish creature demonstrated worldly knowledge far too expansive for an indentured technician stranded in the periphery of space. It proved a mixed blessing, the enlistment she'd earned in so famous a unit. Service aboard the cruiser that had become champion to Council Media only meant her arms summoned the attention of admirers of military history. She did not seriously expect anyone on the habitat to recognize the motifs on her arms. The tattoos were not illustrious with vivid pigments or boastfully large; they were reminders of drunken revelries, of squad-mates and friends celebrating milestones with badges inked into flesh. The militaries of other species regarded asari emblems as too elaborate and runic for practical use. Indecipherable at a glance. Still, Falindra cursed the circumstance of her unconscious arrival without a long sleeve shirt.

"You served in the Turian navy?" she finally asked.

The volus laughed. "Hardly. But I like to consider myself a cultured individual. Enough, at least, to have heard of the reputable Nefrane."

The misfortune of having served on a famous vessel. When the Battle of the Citadel had been ugliest for the defenders, and the asari flagship had fled, carrying the Council to safety, it had been the Nefrane that weathered repeated assaults from geth squadrons and rallied the fleet. Refusing to grant the human reinforcements sole credit for saving the Citadel, asari media was quick to tout the Nefrane's accomplishment. Falindra ought to have been irritated by the volus' quick assessment of her, but instead felt a sudden spark of naval pride, a nostalgic reflection for the battle-sisters with whom she served.

"It's kind of you to notice. Civilians usually forget these things before long."

"I mentioned it to prove a point that you're trained to cause mischief. The Drau won't harm me unless I'm involved directly with an offense against them. So tell me what you want?"

"Elsk," said Falindra.

"Pardon?"

"That is elsk you're brewing, isn't it?" She had identified the fungal smell, a mushroom tea popular as a relaxant, a volus cultural custom. "I've not enjoyed mushroom tea in years. Do you mind the company?"

The volus squeaked surprise then stood in thought a moment. Falindra wished again that she might read the face hidden under the mask. He had already proven a canny enough observer to know when courtesy was a rouse to curry favor. Having krogan for conversational companions might convince anyone after a while to appreciate the niceties of favors being curried.

He opened a cabinet and retrieved two ceramic mugs that hung next to his tools. He poured elsk from the brewing pot until each mug was full. "Careful, it's hot," he said, and proffered one mug.

So began Falindra's friendship with the famous Professor Haylar.

She 'worked the ice' during the day with twenty other slaves. Since she had demonstrated some technical aptitude, the Drau had assigned her to operating one of the two ice-crackers, enormous, industrial drills, monitoring its performance, that the drill performed three thousand revolutions per minute, steadily breaking apart the large rocks of ice that dropped out from chutes into the ice catcher, a large polymer bin that held the ice until the drill attacked it. A batarian completed the bins' safety inspection, and then occupied the control platform for the other drill. A misstep on either of their parts and a drill might send shrapnel of ice shooting throughout the room where twenty more slaves processed the broken chunks of ice on the conveyor belts, preparing the ice for drinking, power usage, and trade.

The job was less arduous than working the conveyor belts and Falindra's vantage point near offered a strategic view of the labor floor. The position had drawbacks. She scanned the room, putting its interior to memory when she saw the five salarian slaves staring back at her. Each one, convinced of his own technical prowess, and having been slaves far longer, resented the easy role she'd won; as though some perverse rules of seniority ought to govern their advancement. The racial loathing between krogan and salarian assured the latter little opportunity for comfort. The Drau happily provided salarians unnecessary work.

Two quarians also watched her. Their rounded masks made their expressions as impossible to assess as Drin Haylar's, but it seemed a safe wager that they too, resented the comfort of her duties. Falindra decided she'd be wise to start cataloguing how many of the slaves might be building grudges.

During her first two weeks in captivity Falindra watched.

The Dread Claw numbered nearly two dozen, more than half of them krogan hailing from Clan Drau. The rest of their ranks were filled out by vorcha.

Bodix, easily recognized by the pockmarks of acid burns across his face, commanded the krogan gang. He had long, muscular arms that looked more than capable of wielding the electrical hammer slung over his back. Despite holding leadership, Bodix was infrequently seen by the slaves. Instead, the overweight Drau Gorba monitored the slaves' daily routines. He was the one who broke up the vorcha fight. He stalked up and down the length of the conveyor belt, ready to admonish any slave whose performance he deemed subpar. He caught a human male, a short man with thin eyes, succumbing to fatigue, partially bent over the conveyor belt while he hauled ice into a coolant unit. Gorba wrapped knuckles against the soft side of the man's abdomen hard enough to leave bruises. The man yelped before redoubling his effort, carrying away usable pieces of ice.

She had identified Drau Mar ambling through the tunnels, patrolling where the slaves slept. She admired his omni-tool. The tattoo of a monstrous skull sat superimposed across his face.

Drau Hurx, the tallest of the krogan, looked bored when he drew the duty of guarding them, though he often stopped to leer at the two other asari slaves the Dread Claw kept. Falindra hoped to avoid winning the same attention.

Drau Zugo often seemed caught in a daydream. His efforts to chastise unproductive slaves were perfunctory compared to Gorba. She easily identified Drau Telx by the finger he usually kept busy plundering a nostril. Those were the only krogan she reliably attached names to so far. There were fourteen krogan in total.

The rest of the Dread Claw consisted of vorcha conscripts, led among their own number by one named Skeb, who retained authority through sheer frequency of violent outbursts, but always deferred to the krogan.

Falindra catalogued each member of the Dread Claw: wanted by agencies of several Citadel government authorities throughout the Caleston Rift for acts of piracy, hijacking, abduction, and slavery.

Twenty slaves and twenty pirates - in between them existed a bizarre version of the middle class in the habitat's social hierarchy. Stranded fringe merchants who occupied a nebulous middle tier between slave and master. Some were hopelessly marooned and only nominally distinct from the slaves, exploited and abused by the Drau, their fates as dim as any captive. Others, like Hastings, won greater respect through some unknown leverage.

Shifts ended when the slaves could no longer stand, even after the encouraging kick, no ice came in, or when machinery broke down (which occurred with blessed frequency). The cog to one of the conveyor belts slid from position, causing the belt to bunch into multiple folds. Ice fell to the floor. The shift came to an end.

Falindra avoided being fingered to assist with repairs. She left the ice drill and retreated downward into the tunnels that led to her new volus acquaintance, who'd formally introduced himself on her second visit as Drin Haylar.

This, her fourth visit, had already established tradition. News of the breakdown had preceded her arrival by way of alarm whistles. He'd already boiled water and had the pot of elsk brewing.

He sat on a work stool, his small feet jutting out. Falindra sat on the floor. A spare stool rested nearby, but she preferred sharing eye-level when they met.

"Last time I visited Irune, I saw a performance by Sura Non," Drin reminisced. That was ten months ago, for my brother's Day of Splendor. I'm not normally one to take in most comedians, but Sura Non has some deliciously barbed social commentary. Smart stuff; very funny."

On Yagi, so far from the comforts of even the humblest homes, people reached out to the memories of civilization and treasured them.

"Why were you so far from Citadel Space," asked Falindra. She knew from their last conversation that he'd already been residing somewhere in the Caleston Rift when the Dread Claw captured him, but little more. She hadn't pressed him at the time, but he'd quickly grown from being distrustful to grateful for her company, relieved to share conversation. Anyone who demonstrated talent for dialogue beyond grunts and growls was a pioneer of the art form compared to the vorcha.

Falindra relied on Drin for the success of their exchanges. Without translator devices they were left to their shared knowledge of one another's language. You grew accustomed to having technology at your fingertips. It made interspecies conversation possible, even easy. The omni-tool always on hand. She spoke one of the turian languages passably well, but no volus. Drin, fortunately, proved fluent in the Asari trade language. He spoke with an awkward Armali dialect, but she understood the words.

"I was a research professor," he finally responded. "On Maskawa." He paused, deciding whether a simple answer sufficed or if he felt comfortable sharing details. "Plasma Engineering. I had a legion of graduate students under me, funding for all my research, major laboratories to command, published papers." He recited the accomplishments with nostalgic pride, just shy of shameless bragging.

"You teach at the Ten-Clan Academy," Falindra verified, hoping he'd provide details about the topics of those papers. She supposed he had earned the right to be proud. He was too polite to brag outright, too soft-spoken. She'd known many people who would never wait for four conversations before guaranteeing that acquaintances were briefed on every merit in their possession, and most people were less qualified. She also sensed by the melancholy in his tone, that this was preamble to a less comfortable topic. Given his specialization, she grew convinced he was the scientist she'd been searching for.

"Yes. Well, no. 'Taught at' is more precise." He sipped his tea through his mask's access port. Shame kept him hesitant. He steeled himself for sharing vulnerabilities to the first attentive audience he'd enjoyed in far too long. Like sin, failures are unburdened with confession. "I conducted research and taught at the Ten-Clan Academy for three years. Except for the occasional departure to guest lecture or visit family, I called the planet home."

Falindra knew little about academia, but heard of the prestige associated with a position at Maskawa. Any scholar might operate from the safe luxury of some civilized bastion of education on a world like Thessia or Irune. Research on the primordial, methane-soaked world of Maskawa was the pursuit of a truly dedicated scientific mind. More so because the planet, in a neighboring system in the Terminus. Undergraduates told thrilling tales and imprinted boldly on resumes even a brief stint on Maskawa, where they risked the threat of pirates and slavers for their dedication to science. The untold side of those tales was when researchers actually became the targets of frontier outlaws.

Drin became preoccupied with the data coming in from the power supply data terminal and turned away. He pressed buttons, feigned busying himself with the task, and then quit almost as quickly as he'd began. "Taught at," he repeated. "My funding was cut."

"Your funding?" echoed Falindra.

"It's formal jargon for 'you are fired'. Not enough practical results, you see." Bitterness came into his voice. "They don't consider the wonderment of scientific discovery, of research for its own sake. To tell the directors that there might be untold applications later is tantamount to gambling. They provide grants and in exchange they expect profits, something that can be patented and sold into the private sector."

"They have to pay for your security somehow, don't they?"

He glared at her defiantly, his respirator making angry ticks. "My research might lead to using lightning storms to power entire cities. No waste. No environmental damage. Even if it took a generation ," Drin sensed his own rant building momentum and cut himself off abruptly.

One question on Falindra's part and he'd grown flustered, defensive. Calm minds don't have ears for zealots. She'd learned that pleading defensive tactics during the Reaper War. In the professor's case, the lesson came from arguing with the university's board of directors.

"Perhaps you're right," he said and sipped his tea.

"Probably not. Powering a city from lightning storms. Sounds fantastic." Falindra stood and stretched her legs, walking across the breadth of the room. In the distance she heard the clunking sound of heavy objects being moved. She thought it came from the landing bay, but had not yet learned the layout of the habitat well enough, let alone the misdirection of echoes and vibrations that gave a building its character.

"I miss the Nefrane," she said, looking back at him. "The ship deserved its reputation. It had a soul the way only old ships can, ships that see their crews through dangers when they have no right to survive them. Its crew were my friends, mentors. I miss having crewmates." She hadn't planned to share such intimate thoughts with the volus; but he had revealed a vulnerability to her and one was owed in exchange.

"I departed Maskawa to plead my case in person with the directors when Dread Claw captured my shuttle. First dismissal, now this." Drin raised his arms to engulf the state of their lives, exasperated at the levels of misfortune reaped upon him. "Or maybe I should simply consider this my new vocation. How about that? A war hero and a preeminent scientist: such a curious pair of slaves we make."

"Don't let the krogan depress you, Drin. I make a horrible slave."


	2. Chapter 2

That night she dreamt of the home she remembered as a child. From her bedroom window she saw the sunrise give halos to the hills. The skies above Serrice held ribbons of cloud. Pictures of five generations of mothers hung on the wall, giving the child's room an odd formality, on another wall: posters of the wild animals she imagined one day for pets. Her first omni-tool lay half buried in blankets on her bed where she'd fallen asleep with it the night before, after secretly playing holo-games hours past her bedtime. She remembered the illicit thrill of trespassing against her mother's rules, the blissful safety of her first home.

The house no longer stood there. Neither did the neighborhood. It had been part of the last targets the Reapers assaulted before the war ended.

She opened her bedroom door and it led into an access corridor aboard the Nefrane. Pale blue light gave ambience to the steel path. She remembered the route, knew it like her bedroom, could navigate the decks blindfolded. Ten paces ahead, turn left, walk twelve paces, take the access ladder down eight rungs, turn right, four more paces: her first posting on the ship. Her battle sisters had welcomed her, even the veterans. They immediately included her in their bravado, guided her, helped Falindra find her confidence. She missed that crew. She rarely regretted the honor of receiving a position within the Serrice Guard. Rarely means sometimes. Accepting the new role had taken her away from the last home she knew. She had thought herself an adventurer without need for such comforts; but it's easy to think that until you're without one.

The data terminal at her workstation displayed a slideshow of heart throbs from her youth. She'd been strongly attracted to turian women, powerful, elegant, and self-possessed. The first stirrings of pubescent hungers had been inspired by the poster of a turian actress dressed in-character for an historical vid detailing her people's early efforts at space exploration.

She turned away from the terminal and saw Drin Haylar at knee level, making repairs at a circuit box. "All done," he said in her dream. Then he started barking and growling and Falindra woke up.

The growling followed her through lucidity and into consciousness. She took a moment to collect her senses in the darkness, to cast off the sleepiness that fogged her brain. The Serrice Guard trained her to make the adjustment within a second. The tunnel was dark; she had expected ambient blue, but dismissed the notion as quickly as it had sprung.

The growling came from ten meters away. Two people, (her ears trained well enough to deduce the number where others might hear a meaningless squabble of grunts). At first she presumed vorcha must be the owners of such bestial sounds. After listening a moment longer she recognized that the sounds came from batarian vocal cords. A third individual yelped with pain. Two more peeled gales of bellowing laughter. Those deep-pitched tones had to come from the double set of lungs krogan possessed.

The yellow-skinned salarian who eyed her with envy at the ice drill sat nearby, curled against the wall. He kept to the shadows, trembling, limbs lurching involuntarily with each squeal of pain heard from beyond view.

Falindra groped the floor until her hand found the sharp metal strip of steel siding she'd hid there after scavenging a dilapidated locker room. She checked the steel-fiber shoe laces she wore: two per shoe, one each near the toes and at the ankles, all properly fastened. She punctured the bottom of her shirt before with the improvised blade before tucking it into her belt, then stuck her finger in the hole and tore a swath off the bottom of the shirt.

After that she pried a nearby ventilation grate loose from the wall – without difficulty; nothing seemed maintained in this habitat beyond what necessity demanded. Crumbs of rust puffed out from the surrounding frame. The screws that had so inadequately performed their task of keeping the vent in place were easily dislodged from their sockets with the sharp press of her thumb. Falindra wrapped the first layer of the swath from her shirt around her right hand, placed four screws along her knuckles, wrapped the fabric around twice more until it was nearly spent, then tied a knot. The salarian watched, bewildered by her activities, and silently mouthed warnings for her to lie back down.

She made a fist to test that the screws sat properly before crawling away from her makeshift nest toward the audible commotion.

It had been one minute, twenty seconds since the growls first woke her.

"Don't go. They'll hurt you too," said the salarian, fear painted in his eyes, even in the dim. She motioned for him to remain in the crevice where he cowered and continued on.

The corridor tapered into a service access route, forcing Falindra to hunch over, ambling with her knees level with her chest. She was confident that her ears gave her an accurate account of the distance, but had not anticipated the disrepair of the tunnel she crawled through. It was one of three routes running near where she slept at night and she had not yet found chance to explore beyond the first fork. Debris littered the ground: broken shards of metal and glass, the skeletal remains of bugs (Yagi was too inhospitable for native life; but pests had talent for stowing aboard vessels and riding among the stars; these ones suffering the fate of arriving where no bounty might sustain them), and the bones of something that had once been much larger than any bug. She turned left at the fork and followed the krogan laughter. She dragged herself by the arms under a partially collapsed bulkhead toward the diffused amber glow of fueled lanterns.

Moments later she poked her head out of the opening where the access tunnel ended. Her chin was pressed against the top of a ladder; she had arrived near the ceiling of what had once been the locker room when this habitat still held the illusory promise of legitimate prosperity and many employees.

Two batarians stood directly below her, shoving a drell back and forth between them, smacking him across the face, the back of the head, the neck. His legs wobbled and he fell. Whatever fight might have occurred during the time it took Falindra to make her way to the room was over. This was predators playing with their food.

The drell's shirt was tattered. A dark, lumpy bruise already began forming around his left eye and his neck was covered in welts. One batarian picked him up, cooing mock sympathies.

The krogan sat further back, having made bleachers for themselves from toppled machinery. "That drell is softer than a baby," chortled one to his cohort's amusement. A vorcha sat between them and, appropriate to his station, below. His unsettling row of fangs flashed a demon smile as he soaked in the blood sport.

She recognized the spectators. Drau Mar was one of the two krogan; the tattoo of a black skull overlaid across his face made it obvious enough. The second one was Hurx. She suspected that the vorcha was Skeb. She found the species hard to differentiate, but he stood taller than his kin and had the bluster to keep company with krogan by himself.

Not for the first time, she missed her equipment. The bio-amp that took seven months from start of manufacture to final tuning to complete; the omni-tool that lagged with the eccentricities of overly adapted computer programs; her body armor; her weapons. This situation should prove the superiority of Serrice Guard training. That's what she hoped. Other Special Forces across the galaxy, from STG to N7, thrived on their gadgetry to the cusp of dependency. The first lesson learned in the Serrice Guard was that tools and toys were fleeting things, lost in the frenetic movements of clandestine operations or destroyed in combat, and that made relying on equipment a burden. Asari commandos were trained to think of how any situation might be approached without equipment. Forced to rely on ingenuity and improvisation, the experience was liberating. On the other hand, Falindra suspected that her instructor never faced krogan internment without a bio-amp.

Two more vorcha entered the room carrying crates of supplies. The noises distracted them from nightly chores. She recognized the one that had been lynched near the conveyor belt. Bruises layered his face. Knowing the vorcha's famous regenerative abilities, Falindra guessed the wounds had been received from a more recent beating, a second in as many days. Nobody seemed safe from the tradition of brawling on Yagi, slave or sentry. The other vorcha, Rog, was slightly hunchbacked. They stayed to watch what was left of the fight.

One batarian punched the drell as the latter tried to get to his feet. The blow's force sent him on his knees again.

The vorcha took turns pushing, nudging, and punching one another, establishing the hierarchy of their new seating arrangement. Falindra saw no better time than the provided distraction. She sprung from the access route with her left arm, the other arm outstretched and braced.

Her padded fist connected with the first batarian. Falindra's aim from twelve feet was true; she connected with his temple, sending him sprawling across the ground.

She knew the second batarian by day as her colleague at the ice drills. The recollection flashed through her mind, but she did not allow it to cause any hesitation. She kicked him in the chest. The kick forced him a distance back, giving Falindra precious seconds to attain a better fighting posture. She caught the krogan and vorcha watching the change of events from her peripheral vision, but so far they hadn't moved.

The first batarian started getting to his feet faster than she expected. She struck out at the second, eliciting a grunt, but found herself flanked before she could deliver a crippling below. Suddenly, with one batarian to each side of her, she was on the defensive, dazzling her opponents with a series of thrusts, feints, and parries. One tested her and the other tried to sneak in. When she fended them off, her two attackers reversed roles and tried again.

Her co-worker (and wouldn't sharing water cooler talk be so much fun come morning) struck hard. She evaded a series of fists until the taller batarian with longer reach came from behind and got his arm around her neck.

The co-worker came at her again, eager to successfully connect a punch and cause pain. His mistake was assuming her defenseless and, in turn, putting his own guard down. She kicked, connecting with his neck. The batarian crashed into the ground, clutching his throat. Stifled gagging noises escaped his lips, panic revealed in all four eyes.

The second batarian became enraged at the sight of his fallen compatriot. He dug into her neck with his fingers, grabbed her by the calf with his second hand, and hoisted her above his head, holding her high with barbaric superiority. He'd not recover from the error. Falindra's legs locked up his left arm. Her elbow smashed into his face, again and again and again: a blur of motion. The cartilage around his nose crumbled. He fell to the ground with her on top and spread across his chest.

She stole a look back at the first batarian to make sure he still lay incapacitated, and then came a spray of stars and blackness and the vertigo of motion as Falindra went hurling across the room.

She blinked the stars out of her eyes, waiting for vision to return. She had landed against the wall, lying atop the spilled refuse from a dustbin.

Drau Mar stood over her. She hadn't seen him move from the makeshift bleachers. He had sat comfortably, joking with his friend while they watched the gladiatorial combat, and they had enjoyed her surprise entry; but he changed from audience to disciplinarian on silent cue. When occasioned to, he moved with frightening speed.

"Fighting is good," said Drau Mar. "Proves you got mettle, that you're worth giving food." His face came closer. "Killing my property is bad." He waited until she nodded confirmation that his message had been successfully delivered through the fog of semi-consciousness. The warning needed to be understood because it would only be given once.

Falindra managed to stand, surreptitiously reaching for the tip of one steel-fiber shoelace. The Serrice Guard were trained to regain their senses in seconds, be it from sleep or the risk of concussion. She feigned grabbing at the pain around her head (in truth, there was little pretending) and made a quick toss, trusting to the adhesive. She so admired his omni-tool. The tiny aglet stuck to the underside of it.

Drau Gorba bulged into the room, angry and shouting. It should have been clear at a glance that no slaves were conspiring or out of control. Any happenings that occurred without his knowledge set his temper into an inferno. He swatted at the still-wounded vorcha to demonstrate his irritation. How Gorba relished unleashing his frustration on the same vorcha, as though he found it cathartic to debase the same creature that often was the source of his annoyance.

Mar gave a snap glare at Gorba, brief, but Falindra saw that no strong bonds of brotherhood united the two.

Mar led his cohorts out of the room. The two batarians, struggling to their feet, eventually followed, leaving Falindra with the drell who had been forgotten by everyone by that point. He stood in the corner of the room, nursing his wounds, soaking droplets of blood from cuts on the back of his head with a grubby handkerchief.

Falindra walked over.

"I guess I should thank you for sparing me the rather unsavory beating they'd thought to offer me." He tried smiling. "Name's Sye Videl, and you'll find that there's no better person to have owing you a debt than myself."

For a man who'd been cowering and defenseless he managed to display a quick façade of charm. How could a man pretend to possess such casual magnetism so soon after being assaulted? She trusted him less for the attempt.

"You all right? Some of those bruises look painful."

"Darling, never tell a man that his face is marred when he's trying to be his most impressive." He struck his chest to embellish the wound she'd caused his honor. "I suffer the shame of being rescued by a beautiful maiden instead of being the one who performed the rescue. Otherwise I'm fine. Believe me," added Sye, "it's far more undignified when the vorcha start licking my skin to get high."

"Why did they attack you?' Falindra decided it was best to dismiss the image of a tongue-wagging vorcha before it festered.

"Why wouldn't they? You're clearly new here. The krogan encourage fighting among the slaves. Drau Mau taught you as much. They figure it's the surest way of seeing if a laborer has the strength to be worth his keep. Of course I haven't seen anyone inflict the sort of harm you just did. If a slave is too incapacitated to work come morning, the Drau investigate and the culprit winds up twice as maimed."

"Guess that's one way they keep discipline," Falindra muttered.

Sye chuckled, inspecting the tiny flecks of blood on the handkerchief, disappointed that, for the pain he felt, there lacked the signs of a more horrendous wound to describe when he recounted the tale of his part in the brawl. Thankfully, the gods had gifted Sye with the wondrous talent for exaggeration. The batarians would be each eight feet tall before long.

"Nobody wants to fight a krogan. Well, except maybe you. You really tore apart those batarians. Unbelievable"

Falindra was pleased by his evaluation despite herself. She expected gratitude, but what she needed was for him to be impressed. If beating Hastings and his goons wasn't enough, besting the batarians with Drau Mar watching was certain to give her a reputation. Looking to gain notoriety was a risk; most people in her predicament preferred avoiding attention, tried to keep away from krogan notice as much as possible. Keeping to herself would not build alliances with the other slaves. Risk it was.

Arriving here served a purpose, two actually. She needed to collect information, though, and get moving. The fact that she'd been forced into this predicament only proved that her assignment was more crucial than she realized.


	3. Chapter 3

The third week was excruciating, if uneventful. Bodix had decided that new quotas were needed. Whether it was possible for Kobayashi's rings to yield more ice seemed irrelevant. He demanded more ice so Gorba barked twice as often on the conveyor belt floor. The drills cracked. The laborers broke the rocks of ice further into manageable chunks, purified, packaged.

Bodix was rarely there himself. He returned in the evenings, exhausted and gratified from days spent fighting and ransacking rival ice bandits on Yagi or one of Kobayashi's thirty-six other moons. Falindra could only guess how many of those moons might be occupied with similar operations.

On the first day of the week, during a brief midday respite while a coolant unit was repaired, she approached the taller batarian who worked the conveyor belt, Ralik. His posture became defensive. She reached down to her shoe and snapped off another aglet of one shoelace, a different type than the one she'd managed to affix to Drau Mar's omni-tool. Falindra heard humans often quip that women have a special relationship with their shoes. She didn't know their culture well enough to understand the mockery this conveyed, but in her own case, for very different reasons, it happened to be true.

She opened the tip to reveal a capsule inside. "Here," she offered it.

Ralik, his nose permanently bent where she'd broken it in two places, was quick to give her a look of menace. "What is that?"

"Pain killer. A good one. It'll measure out, last three days."

"Why would you possibly show me any kindness? It's poison. Do not fool with me." His eyes went to her hands, to her effective elbows.

"You're back on the floor five hours after we fought," said Falindra. "You're pushing through the ice faster than anyone else here. I respect that. If you're really worried that I'm trying to poison you, just tell your friends what I gave you. If you die, the krogan will kill me soon after, right?"

"Small consolation." He took the capsule. Maybe she'd been convincing, maybe the pain had become intolerable. He gave her a slight nod.

She let the conversation end there and returned to her workstation. She might find an occasion soon enough where she regretted giving away her only ration of pain medication. The sacrifice was worth the gamble if it helped avoid one more vendetta. Fights were frequent enough that if she assuaged his wrath, Ralik could easily find older scores to settle.

She had climbed back into the booth that held her chair and the work panel for the drill where she prodded and pulled levers that manoeuvered the giant machine and put it into action. Waiting for the next rock of ice to be funnelled in, she broke open the circuit panel door and studied the wiring.

On the second day of the week, during lunch, she sat with the two other asari that the krogan had acquired. They were Armali and the veneer of unity maintained for show among the galactic community as a whole never entirely healed the rivalry that persisted between Armali and Serrice. Thessia had far outgrown such concerns as the depravity of civil war, but that didn't equate to utopia and Falindra felt no urge to be the peacemaker; she'd nurtured her own rivalries over the years. Nonetheless, if she avoided the two asari it might evoke curiosity among the krogan and fellow prisoners. The human slaves kept each other company. All the salarians were together. The two quarians shared the corner of a table.

The three enjoyed their lunches together amicably, if enjoyment could describe eating synthetic protein paste and rancid pyjak meat in the cavernous room that had thermal ovens to one side and open latrines to the other.

Sye joined them, her specifically. He sat by her side, grin on his face, greeting the asari with unwarranted cheer. He began entertaining Falindra with his gift for chat, which no one better recognized, or appreciated, than himself. Falindra had suspected he might gravitate toward her for protection, but hadn't counted on efforts to woo her with conversation. It seemed her misfortune that, like Drin, Sye was fluent in the Asari trade tongue. He practically forgot to eat his lunch, scarfing down quick spoonfuls between his words.

"… And that was how I stole a Hammerhead and escaped from the Systems Alliance with three crates of high grade iridium." He concluded his story. Falindra listened long enough to identify the piloting techniques he claimed to use during his escape and knew they were impossible in the planetary conditions he described moments before. Super terrestrial, high-gravity worlds and sharp, ninety degree climbs don't mix if you enjoy keeping wings on your aircraft. She nodded in the right places while he spoke and he was content.

In addition to Asari, Sye spoke the human English language, the salarian Mannovan dialect, the related batarian tongues of Voglee and Igswish, and krogan Urdnot (and more recently acquired krogan Drau). He gave himself the title of polyglot as though the word bestowed nobility. In the slave camp, without omni-tools or VI translators, such talent had power. Slaves, like their owners, kept to their own species. His gift for tongues allowed Sye to make acquaintances, to build relationships unavailable to anyone else; and when translators were needed, if the slaves didn't want the krogan to know what they spoke about, he bartered for favors. Sooner or later, everyone wanted the interpreter. Hardly a night went by where requests weren't made.

They were prisoners. Slaves. In the deplorable environment of a malfunctioning habitat, isolated on a lifeless moon, and Sye acted as though he enjoyed her company over dinner in some high-class restaurant that required dress codes and reservations. She found him exasperating, might have dismissed him altogether if not for the socket above his top vertebra where a bio-amp might attach, had it not been confiscated. He was not a slave like others at the table, but one of the fringe merchants. Given that the krogan allowed him to be beaten, whatever relationship he once enjoyed with the Dread Claw had clearly deteriorated.

"So have any of you darlings ever been sky-sailing," he asked.

The three asari exchanged looks and returned to eating their gruel.

On the third day she found time to visit Drin. The perpetual fragrance of mushroom filled his nook. He busied himself making repairs to a circuit board. Pliers, welding wire, an oscilloscope, omni-gel, flux-meters, and ultraviolet lenses lay littered across the table, but the omni-tool around his arm impressed her most. It was by no means on par with the one Drau Mar wore, or likely the one that preeminent scientist, Drin Haylar, ordinarily carried, but to possess one at all, regardless of sophistication, surprised her.

"The krogan, let you have that," she pointed to it.

"The tea is ready, please help yourself. My hands are dirty." Whose weren't? "I need the omni-tool to perform the tasks they assign me. Little things like keeping the oxygen recycled or making sure the temperature isn't one hundred kelvin."

The breathing apparatus in his environmental suit clicked and rasped periodically, but Falindra barely noticed. "I get it, you're important." She poured herself tea and sat beside the professor. Though the omni-tool surely possessed translation software, they grew to enjoy the melody of each other's accents.

Discarded metal tubing rested in arm's reach. She grabbed a narrow 'L' shaped one, tinkering with it, for all appearances, absent-mindedly. A small switch controlled the cut-off valve that sat a third way down the pipe. Her thumb toyed with the switch.

"Not so important that anyone seems inclined to ask a ransom for me, and fewer seem outspoken about paying, but important enough I suppose that the krogan keep me safe from the rowdiness they encourage among the other captives or the vorcha. They know it takes little to puncture my suit. One hard slip onto sharp objects and they'll be left with nothing but a bloated volus corpse."

"Graphic."

"Apologies. How's the tea? I've been improving the water purification."

"Tasty. Less lime than before." She tried saying 'delicious' in volus, believing she might recall the word from an obscure informal lesson provided by friends, but then worried she might be remembering the youthful delights of discovering profanities in alien tongues, and thought better about making the attempt.

"They keep you busy," she asked, rising from her seat to pace, metal piping still in hand. She deposited it atop the much larger steam pressure pipes that ran the length of the room and then returned to her seat. The professor either didn't notice or didn't care.

"Busy enough. The sulfate particle matter in the air had already killed all their turian slaves before I arrived."

"I thought I saw one. She operates the refrigeration units." Falindra returned to her seat. He stared up at her for a long moment and she thought he might ask about the missing pipe after all, but as she'd eventually learn, once Drin had his mind dedicated to a task, his thoughts were consumed. If he remembered their conversation it'd be a marvel.

"Zoreen is the exception. She's a biotic. She maintains a low-level biotic field around her, but it's exhausting and can't be maintained while she sleeps." He paused before adding somberly, "It's unlikely she'll survive much longer if the Dread Claw keeps her."

Sounds reverberated into Drin's room through corridors and vents from other areas. They heard the growls of vorcha infighting come from a cargo room. Broken, mechanical whirring noises that sounded like _clug, clug, clug_ came from the reclamation room. Singing trickled down from another location. It sounded like the human girl, judging by the timbre. It was off-key and warbled in the untrained effort to reach extended notes, but was sweet and beautiful and haunting the way singing sounds when it's the only solace left.

Falindra stared at the computer monitors that lined the wall above the work table. Data streams displayed units and numbers important only to the ghosts of whoever first built this habitat, to engineers, and to her. One screen showed an ideal and inaccurate layout of the three levels, filling each room with green, yellow, or red colors to indicate air and environmental optimum quality. Humans used those color indicators. It had originally been a human habitat. The colors were evenly distributed. She recalled that green was good, but only guessed what the others indicated. Though she supposed equal division was bad no matter how she deciphered the legend. The ice processing room where they assembled each day was yellow.

She returned to her seat and took a sip from her mushroom tea. "Professor Haylar," she hadn't called him that before, but it sounded right. It suited him. "Your research, you said that you were travelling home to Irune to plead your case for the plasma collectors, for more funding. Why did you think you could change their minds?"

He stopped tinkering with the circuit panel, pivoted on his stool so that his body faced her. His stubby feet jutted out and pointed toward her knees. The respirator betrayed a slow inhale, slow exhale. He made no other sound. Had she made an error asking? How might she feel if someone broaching the topics of the failures she suffered in life? To make them sound like subjects for random conversation? She had her share, most recently the trap that led to her capture and current circumstances on Yagi. His answers were important, but she could not tell him that, not yet.

"They wanted practical applications. With limited additional funding I planned to collect data on the efficacy of plasma batteries."

She repeated his last words to make sure she understood. "There must be millions of those in use. How large a sample would you need?"

"You misunderstand. I'm referring to large, industrial plasma batteries, the kind used by navies or to provide emergency power to frontier settlements. Thousands exist, still a large number, but certainly not millions. They cost considerable capital to manufacture, transport, and maintain. I hoped a detailed survey of plasma batteries used in such operations might demonstrate the long term potential of plasma collectors as replacements."

"Civilization powered by a lightning storm," she marvelled, not pretending to understand the principles and technologies he had mastered.

"Something like that. With the frequency and predictability of storms on Maskawa, I hoped." Those were the theories and events and outcomes and he tried to summarize with impartiality; he was a good scientist. Yet even under the mechanics of his mask, behind his veneer of stoicism, she heard the frustration, the bitterness at seeing discovery and achievement thwarted by people of smaller minds. He was a good scientist.

On the fourth day Falindra began her new exercise regimen. She'd been performing her routines of push-up variations, pull-ups, stretches, the martial and meditative exercises she'd learned in the Asari Fleet and honed once in service with the Serrice Guard; but she'd yet to run. Her body was starved for it, craved the waylaid activity. Finally, she surrendered to the old addiction; she ran.

She ran through every tunnel and cavernous room, up sets of stairs and down others and climbed a wall where the southern stair route had collapsed beyond use. The krogan gave her suspicious glances when she ran past them, particularly Drau Mar, who made clear exactly which sections of the habitat were off-limits unless she fancied the receiving end of chain-blades. Drau Hurx thought she might be mentally deranged. She wasn't chasing anyone or being chased, making her effort without purpose.

Falindra needed the sensation to invigorate her body. She missed her bio-amp, the superior Savant IX that became an extension of her. With it she felt every cell in her body, the flow of blood, the movement of bone, the breath in her lungs; she felt the wind and the world all with acute awareness. She'd heard of ideologists who rallied against the dangers of putting cybernetic implants into people's heads, arguments with merit, she supposed, but those people never understood the life of biotics. Now exercise, the sense of blood flow, the ache and release of every muscle, was all that reminded her of what had been stolen.

The top level was divided into two sections. Both were off limits. She ran through the other areas, though, with relative freedom. Anyone who might have objected saw her depart before they had an opportunity to voice disapproval. She ran through the tunnels and makeshift barracks to one self-appointed destination, then run back to her starting point following a different route. She mastered paths with the worst debris and made mental notes of which ones she might hurry along with the least noise. She ran twice a day: once before work started and once shortly after. On the Nefrane, she'd memorized every room, corridor, and access tunnel, knew every floor panel that creaked from the pressure of putting her weight on it. Her dream reminded her of that, of its importance.

She counted the krogan and vorcha. She counted the indentured merchants and slaves. She studied their habits and friendships. Drau Mar and Drau Hurx shared camaraderie and neither of them showed much regard for the processing room overseer, Drau Gorba. The vorcha, Kryts, relished any opportunity to taunt a slave and had earned their collective hatred as a result.

Drau Zugo was surprisingly amicable toward Sye Videl. Drau Telx occasionally shared jokes with the older asari, Elayda, since the two could reminisce about events they both remembered from centuries before the rest of the habitat's occupants were born. There were other unexpected friendships between slave and enslaver.

A blonde, middle-aged woman named Muriel Brickley had influence among the large contingent of human slaves. Her counterpart among the salarians was the rusty colored Vallon Corla. The sole turian, Zoreen Kostracus, was permitted to keep a bio-amp on a restricted setting because its judicious use kept her alive long after the corrupted environment killed other captive members of her species. Falindra craved the device to the brink of avarice, even if it proved inferior to her beloved Savant. Since taking the bio-amp was tantamount to murder of the current owner, longing for its promised power was akin to the pursuit of water mirages in the desert.

There was only so much she might observe during a single run. Falindra exercised twice a day.

On the fifth day, she attempted to speak with the young human girl, Santina Palomarez. Falindra approached her outside a cargo room where several humans slept, hoping that she remembered the human language lessons she received in the naval academy. It had been an optional course.

Santina was playing, attempting to construct a model house from broken pieces of metal and plastic. They were the only two individuals awake in the early hour before power was drawn into the ice drill and conveyor belts. These two who forced themselves awake before anyone else, one to exercise her body, the other to exercise her imagination away from the scornful eyes of adults who failed to understand the importance of her constructions. Shoulder-length chocolate colored hair kept falling over Santina's eyes.

Falindra tried saying hello, tried complimenting the house under construction. The girl stared mutely. Finally, Falindra gave up, smiled warmly, hoping for the virtue of the language in smiles, and continued on her run.

Santina continued staring in the direction where the asari headed. She reflected on the strange, exotic asari, the beauty and strength that Falindra possessed and which Santina admired. And she thought it curious that the language of aliens reminded her of the sound of Asian tongues, like Japanese or Korean. She wished she spoke alien words, not just her native Spanish or the samples of English learned in school. Then she returned to the completion of her model house.

The sixth day was uneventful. She exercised in the morning, later performed her slave duties, and then exercised in the evening. If there was time, she planned to see Drin Haylar in the operations room. She sat with him during lunch when he chose to show, but he usually preferred taking food back to his work station on sub-level. When that happened she sat with the other asari, more often next to Sye Videl who always found her. With a sum of only thirty-odd laborers, and two long tables in the cafeteria, it was easy to find the person with whom you wanted to dine and those who you wanted to avoid. People fell into patterns, sat in the same place every meal. Sye was the exception, since he never minded moving after already being seated if he spotted someone arriving late and looking in dire need for the pleasure of endless conversation. She wondered how long she'd survive being called 'darling'.

"Why do you keep staring at the wall," he asked, interrupting her reverie.

Sye did not appear the sort who showed discretion with secrets, not with his love for chatter. He also used his love for trivia to learn facts about the habitat that other slaves paid no mind. She supposed she'd not be the first person here who alluded to escape if a question or two were hazarded.

"I've been wondering about the shuttle pad. Ever been there? Since arriving, I mean. Ever see what kind of shuttles they have," she asked.

"Sure, all the time," he smiled.

She cast a dubious look at him. She'd never been bestowed with the most acute sense of humor, and her temper was likely to reach its edge if he was teasing.

"Seriously," he responded to her silent disbelief. "I'm not a slave like most of you. I chose to be here so the krogan let me have more liberties."

"What do you mean you chose to be here?" Falindra was incredulous.

"I stowed aboard an asari freighter three months back and when they landed, I asked if I might stay. Showed I could do my share, and Drau Bodix let me remain."

"You chose to come here?"

Sye, according to his many stories, loved only three things: women, gambling, and as much labor as he might escape performing in life. Therefore, his quest to join in the grueling work detail of labor camps, where safety regulations were fiction and where he risked being beaten nightly by his cohabitants, was suspect.

"Let's just say I owe people money," he said.

"So?"

"I owe lots of people lots of money. Lots of unkind, narrow-minded, materialistic sorts of people, quite different from you or me. So let's just say, darling, that having a ring of de facto krogan bodyguards makes this the safest place in the Terminus for me right now." Sye plucked the last morsel of gruel from his plate and flicked it from thumb to mouth with gusto.

"Even though they encourage batarians to give you five shades of bruising."

"The krogan may respect someone the most if he knows how to fight," said Sye. "But they'll give grudging leftovers to the weak warrior who is at least willing to take a beating rather than run from it."

"You're not going to survive much more of their respect," she said and saw the flicker of worry on his brow at consideration of this possibility. "So you said they'll let you near the shuttles." she continued. "What do they have on the pad?"

Sye made several thoughtful humming noises while counting off the shuttles his fingers. "Let's see…. There's the large, rectangular thing Hastings owns; the small, bug-looking salarian vessel; the krogan keep a couple that look like they've got lasers. Ah, then there's the disc-shaped thing…."

Falindra gaped at the details he provided, or lack thereof. She raised her hand for him to stop. "You're telling me that among the shuttles kept here you've spotted a big one, a small one, a round one, and some with guns, is that about right?"

Sye thought it over. "Yeah."

"You're really not inclined toward the technical side of things, are you, Sye?"

"Darling, for you, I'd learn."

She thought about asking him whether he might have means of sneaking out to the shuttle pad, even for a brief reconnoiter, but decided against it. He had chosen to come here, elected to remain in the company of these krogan for whatever poorly rationalized reason he held. If she began asking for aid, his loyalties would, at best, be divided.

After her evening exercises she visited Drin Haylar. The advantage of having krogan as overlords was sleep schedules. The krogan required eleven hours sleep in a twenty-nine hour cycle and they operated their slaves along this schedule. Most other species, required far less. Salarians, only needed five during the same period of time and Falindra had often spotted them improvising makeshift sports using rubble for equipment, or playing card games. No slave had ever been burdened with so much free time.

Drin had the mushroom tea waiting. Falindra began to marvel at his seeming inexhaustible supply and felt a pang of guilt that he provided her so much while she, in exchange offered nothing. Marooned, with no likely prospects of seeing a return to one's old life, of seeing home, a person finds comfort in the old habits of routine living. The mind craves these routines, the familiarity, the power over life's details. Being a good host was Drin's custom. Tea was served.

While sipping her tea, Falindra spotted a stack of boxes, each one about the size of a soap bar. They were packages of self-sealing concrete gel. She grabbed one and waved it in front of Drin's face until he nodded permission for her to pocket it.

"Be careful. The moment the packages is ripped open the gel hardens in seconds."

She knew. He never asked why she requested supplies, to what purpose they served, why the occasional collection of bolts or wires or tools went missing. He tinkered with his repair work, and that kept him content. There was the silent understanding that he preferred ignorance and so she said nothing when she studied his monitors or borrowed his tools.

She spoke his name and this time waited for his full attention. When they first met Drin said he wanted nothing to do with the trouble she brought. Absconding supplies already pushed the envelope. He'd not be able to feign innocence if he was capable of helping her with this next request. She waited until he paused from his labours, put the circuit board down, and offered undivided attention.

"I want to have a look outside," she said.

He knew immediately that her request did not echo the desperate sentiments shared by every other captive to grab some long-needed glimpse beyond their confines, to catch sight of the other moons and stars and know that the galaxy still existed.

"What did you hope to see?"

He deserved an honest answer. He might not agree to help after, but he'd not betray her intentions to the krogan.

"A look at the shuttle pad for starters. You mentioned that several existed on this moon. Mostly, I need to look at the helium-3 extractors that orbit Kobayashi."

She waited for objections, for the accusation that she was crazy or putting him in danger by making such requests. She expected he'd tell her to leave and Falindra would simply have to abandon her best option for getting outside. Maybe she'd have to reconsider getting help from Sye. Instead, he simply asked: "why those?" His respirator hissed. He referred to the helium-3 extractors.

Falindra gave him a measured look. "We both know that the ice-cracking operation here is small. It's too small to...," she was about to say pay for its own upkeep but given the habitat's condition, such insight was obvious. "To be worthwhile. They do it for a few extra credits, but I wager it's mostly for trade, to attract the fringe merchants they need for funnelling in food and supplies. The Dread Claws are pirates and like any pirate, they're looking for a large payday. And that's the helium-3. That's what Drau Bodix is so concerned about protecting, why he's hardly ever here during the day." The last theory was a guess, but a logical one. Drin Haylar did not leave the habitat and the krogan had other competent repairmen in their ranks. Either the krogan stumbled upon the helium-3 extractors preferred using the gigantic machines until they wore out rather than risking anyone but themselves near the hardware; or, Falindra suspected, the pirates had been told not to allow anyone near the helium-3 extractors by someone who did keep them operational.

Drin sighed while he thought, the sound magnified with significant gravity by his environmental suit. "I do not know this habitat so well. Even when my duties give me license to areas the other slaves are restricted from. I've been to the shuttle pad twice. But I know nothing about their helium-3 operations, save of course that they exist. I don't even know where you'd go to catch a glimpse of them."

Falindra resigned herself to the response and was about to sip the last of her tea and leave when he surprised her by adding: "come back tomorrow morning."

"Why?"

"You only ever visit me in the evenings. Come by in the morning before you have to work the ice drill."

That evening, she awoke abruptly from a nudge to her side. Someone kicked her, not hard enough to hurt strongly, but the culprit foot lacked civility.

"Wake up, asari," ordered a deep voice, hushed and yet still it filled the air. She turned and opened her eyes. There was no point in feigning sleep; she had been stirred awake for over a minute. Falindra sensed someone's approach long before the kick connected. She detected the heavy, measured krogan footfalls, took time during his approach to test whether she could identify the individual by those footfalls.

Drau Mar sat down on the ground beside her, bending his legs, knees propped up. The skull tattoo across his face carried a faint fuchsia glow in the dim of broken light. He carried a full liquor bottle in one hand; in the other two glass beakers he'd absconded from the old science lab tapped against each other.

"Here," he said, offering one beaker. He poured until her glass was filled nearly to the rim, began pouring into his own, before he thought about efficient methods of drinking, and instead tossed his beaker aside, sending it shattering on the floor past Falindra's feet. He took a swig from the bottle. She looked at him, questions in her eyes. Had he found the tracking device she attached to his omni-tool after he broke up her fight with the batarians? If so, she suspected that only one of them left this encounter still able to walk.

"Batarian ale," he said, responding to one unspoken question, if not the most pressing.

Falindra tilted the beaker back and took two gulps. The drink was sour and pungent, but she liked how it immediately made her body tingle.

"Thank you," she said. His omni-tool activated for communications afforded them near real-time translation of his Drau and her Serrice.

The tunnel was dark. It was always dark. A soft amber luminescence drifted in from the a cargo room's ceiling fixtures, casting long shadows, but she could barely see the krogan's face, distinguish where the black skull tattoo ended and mottled skin began. The angle of light silhouetted his presence, made his girth all the more imposing. His limbs never moved unless it was deliberate, to raise bottle to mouth. Besides that, they were still. No twitches, no spasms, no fidget. His face did not move except to open its jaw. He conserved strength, revealed a consciousness of movement by the lack of it. The tension came off him in waves. Motionlessness belied his ability to explode with action.

Drau Mar was a predator.

"How's your drink," he asked.

"Not bad. I prefer ice brandy."

"Yeah, that stuff can hit the gullet nice on occasion. Myself, I've been partial in recent years to having a Bloody Aztec."

"To what?" Falindra never heard of that one.

"Human drink. Don't know what it is exactly. Lots of alcohol, something called tequila, mixed with bovine milk and a spice called cocoa, I think. Damned good."

"I've never heard of krogan enjoying anything but ryncol."

"I'm, what do you call it? A connoisseur. That's it." The omni-tool had no difficulties translating. Mar had trouble thinking of the word in his language. Among krogan it was a rarely used word. "I was introduced to it when the Drau fought to liberate Terra Nova. Took a month before we had them Reaper zombies contained. Before they stopped working entirely, of course. Human platoon I worked with, they introduced me to the drink. Couldn't get enough of it." He smiled to himself with the memory, his first expression. Rows of sharp teeth glinted off the amber light. He took another swig of the ale.

"I was stationed with the salarians on Mannovai before being called back to asari space," Falindra said. "Nothing to drink for three months but Salarian Rum. Tastes horrible, like drinking sugary mud, and it has no bite."

Drau Mar chortled. "Leave it to salarians, not knowing how to make decent drinks."

"Yeah," Falindra said wistfully. She had hated leaving. Command had called it redeployment but everyone knew it was a retreat. She heard the fighting got much worse on Mannovai after she left and often wondered if any of the salarians she'd served with had survived.

Her mind became lost in the memories of faces. She was never one to recall fights. The worst fights, the ones that became a collage of smoke and blood and chaos, those haunted you, invaded dreams when you least expected. In the navy, those sights were rare unless the ship took a horrendous beating or, as the case on Mannovai, detachments of naval personnel were stationed planet-side to lend support. That's what happened on Mannovai. She recalled the card games and biotic wrestling matches and drinking contests that troops enjoyed to stave off the boredom between battles. Those were the sorts of memories she cared to keep. The best was the famous tent competition. The quartermaster promised tents with the next supply shipment. What arrived were mammoth pavilions, absurdly complex to set-up. They came with unintelligible instruction manuals. The two units were awe struck until someone proposed the competition: the asari were tasked with erecting the salarian tent and vice versa. Now each faction was guided by alien instruction manuals.

The salarians won, naturally. Falindra and her squad-mates were dumbfounded by what the salarians called a tent. Built to house a squad of twelve troops, it included a power generator, heat dispersion to counter infrared sensors, satellite uplinks, electric thermal systems, and holographic camouflage siding. The asari tent, by modest comparison, was designed with the chief responsibility in mind of keeping rain off soldiers' heads. The salarians won the competition, would have won fifteen minutes sooner were they not convinced that they'd overlooked fancy extensions that did not exist and searched the storage crate for secret compartments. The two squads laughed at one another for days afterward. The inside-jokes became epic.

"You served with a commando unit," asked Drau Mar, jarring her back into the present.

Falindra hesitated, considering how to phrase her response. "What makes you think I have any commando experience? Who didn't fight in the Reaper War?" She didn't deny the possibility. Did the whole habitat already know she was in the Serrice Guard? If a civilian like Drin suspected, then it shouldn't have been a surprise that a seasoned fighter like Drau Mar saw signs. Still, getting into a few brawls hardly qualified someone as having received elite combat training, otherwise half the population in the Terminus would be commandos. She wasn't sure how he came to the conclusion, but suspected that if he caught her in an outright lie then whatever warranted this display of courtesy would be gone.

Drau Mar tilted his head, the hunter studying his quarry. He disliked his question being answered with another question, saw the feint for what it was. "Let me tell you," he began, voice becoming earnest. "We know how to get slaves when we need them. Some we buy others we just grab. They're easy enough to find this far from Citadel Space. We never had somebody actually pay us to take one, though. That's a new one. There you were, chemically unconscious, restrained on the girder, and Bodix was offered twenty-thousand credits to take you. Twice what we'd ever pay to buy one."

"That makes me a commando," Falindra asked.

"Maybe not. But see, the human who brought you here –"

"Walbeck," Falindra interrupted. She blurted the name out like it was a curse, some ugly, hateful word.

Mar grinned and repeated the name. "Walbeck, he's clearly scared of you. Scared, and he doesn't much like you either. Now I've seen a million people fear a million others," Mar continued, his deep voice strangely inappropriate for banter. "And millions that hate millions. They all usually come looking for krogan to deal with their concerns, and expect that the dealing be done with ammunition. I've taken more jobs as a bodyguard or killer than I can count. Never had someone hate and fear a captive, then pay good money to keep the captive alive, though. That's new."

"And this makes me a commando," asked Falindra, perplexed now by his reasoning.

"It means you're trouble of the kind I ain't figured out yet, but definite trouble. Bodix doesn't see it. Partly because he likes money, partly because he probably wants to mate with you, but mostly I think it's that he has never seen an asari commando in action. I have."

Falindra fell silent, uncertain what her response should be, and because she did not relish the idea of Drau Bodix making sexual overtures towards his slaves.

"Now Walbeck wants you alive. Bodix wants you alive. Damn, there are actually a few people that insist on you breathing," Mar said. "So killing you is grief for me. It means a fight with Bodix that will end with one of us dead, and if I survive, it's only more grief later…." He caught himself before saying who the culprit might be to give him such grief. "But I've seen what asari commandos can do. If I sense any trouble from you, any provocation, bet your quads I will end you. I'll point my shotgun at your face and you'll be nothing but bits on the wall. You understand?"

Falindra waited a moment to reply, allowing the weight of his words to fill the air. "Yes, I understand." Then, she added: "Thank you." It was on her tongue to ask who the authority was above Bodix. Was Walbeck connected to them? The human had betrayed her, betrayed his own government. Like Mar indicated, it would have been easier and safer if the man simply killed her, which meant someone told him to deliver her to the Dread Claw.

Mar nodded. She was no fool; she understood that he'd sooner kill her and face the consequences than allow her to become out of control. He handed her the bottle and what remained of its contents. "Here," he offered, rising to his feet. "I've got more. Drink it, or barter with the other slaves."

Falindra thanked him and watched Drau Mar walk away. The meeting had been brief, yet established an awkward degree of mutual respect. The realization struck her that one of them would not be survive her stay on Yagi. She grew somber. It was an even gamble on who'd be the survivor.

An interesting revelation struck her then: Walbeck told Bodix that she was in the Serrice Guard. He'd have to. If she caused 'trouble' as Mar put it and the Dread Claw learned later that they were not told critical information about their new slave, Walbeck was going to find his life span drastically reduced. Bodix had to know who she was, but Mar didn't; he'd been left to make conclusions on his own. The Drau were not a harmonious group. Friction existed between the leadership and some of those being led. She filed the realization away in her mind.

The next morning Falindra skipped her routine exercises to visit Drin Haylar like he asked. She wondered what to expect. He had something planned to her benefit, judging by their previous conversation had ended, but he'd been cryptic about the details. She took the route down to the sub-level two that she discovered during her afternoon run two days past, using the time walking down to become familiar with the eccentricities of the route. There were obstructions. The wall had fallen apart in two locations, revealing exposed insulation and wiring. They obscured the view from either direction. She inventoried this observation with other mental notes she made about the habitat.

She approached the operations room from the southern corridor instead of the usual north one, passing through cargo room four. The room smelled faintly of mold. It housed nothing besides busted crates and the broken knick-knacks left behind that no one yet thought worth stealing. Past the cargo hold and in the corridor Falindra heard voices come from the operations room and she halted. Drin never had visitors besides herself. None she'd seen. The krogan were content to leave him to his devices so long as he kept environmental conditions habitable and fulfilled their repair requests. Considering he held power over the equipment that sustained their lives, security around the volus was absurdly lax. The Dread Claw rarely watched what he did down in the sub-level. She listened for a moment, gauging the number of speakers, then continued walking, cautious and silent.

One voice, to be expected, was Drin Haylar's. "Very good," he said. "And two times three? What do you think that is?"

Falindra paused at the entrance and peered in. Drin stood in the middle of the room, stout and belly protruding, immersed in his role as teacher. Beside him one of the vorcha sat on the ground, legs akimbo, fixated by the large metal object resting on his lap. It was the vorcha with the rich brown hide that the others had beaten and that Drau Gorba delighted to torment.

"Eight?" the vorcha responded, asking more than answering.

"Try again," Haylar said patiently. "Use the abacus."

That was the square, metal object resting on his lap, she realized. It had been fashioned with spare parts. The lid of a circuit panel made the frame. Steel spokes from a small wheel were used for ten wires, each one adorned with bolts and hex nuts for beads. Haylar had even gone to the trouble of painting the beads different colors. Most were yellow, but a pair on each wire was red.

The vorcha studiously slid one bead, then another, then one more. He repeated the actions on the next wire up. Finally, he looked back up at Drin. "Six," he answered with slightly more confidence.

"Very good, Gursk. Six exactly."

Gursk giggled with delight.

A vorcha does not make pretty sounds when it giggles. It sounds full of phlegm and spittle and what Falindra imagined livestock sounded like if high on drugs before going to the slaughter.

"Mechano-Man is so smart," squealed Gursk. "Thank you, Mechano-Man."

"Yes, I'm quite profound and you're very welcome," said Drin. "So now you can tell me again the answer to two times two."

Here is where things got tricky. Gursk stared blankly at the abacus. He recalled that if asked what two plus two or two times two equalled, then in those cases the 'plus' and the 'times' meant the same thing. But suddenly, when dealing with a two and three in combination, 'plus' and 'times' meant different things entirely. It was a riddle.

"Five," said Gursk.

"You're not using the abacus," scolded Drin.

"Oh yeah. Me forgot." He returned to playing with the beads. Falindra was uncertain whether he used them for mathematics or simply because he enjoyed watching the hex nuts slide back and forth across the wires.

After observing them in silence for several minutes, Falindra entered the room. "Hello, Professor Haylar."

Gursk jumped to his feet instantly, raised his claws, and snarled. Falindra kept her arms at her side and remained calm, knowing that those claws could do serious damage. She trusted that Drin did not invite her here to fight a vorcha.

"Settle down, Gursk." Drin stepped in front of him, putting his body in between the two potential combatants. He had activated the translator in his omni-tool for their meeting. "Calm yourself, please." He sounded nervous making the request. "Now I told you that she'd be visiting, remember?"

Gursk thought this over. "Oh yeah, me forgot Mechano-Man told. Me head too full with three plus three."

"It happens to the best of us, but that's still no excuse for being rude to my guest."

Gursk looked down glumly at the volus. "Me sorry, Mechano-Man."

"This is Falindra. She is my friend. I told you about her."

"Yes, yes! She fight in ships. She navy. Also fights with elbows. Me saw. You good fighter," he complimented her.

"You told him I served in the navy." Her eyes flashed irritation.

"I wanted him to be willing to meet you. Gursk is intrigued by ships. The moment he knew you worked on an asari cruiser, he became eager for the chance to talk with you. I hope it wasn't a secret."

Evidently, secrecy among the slaves was like professionalism among the wardens: sorely lacking. By now any pretense of undercover work became an impossible joke. She might as well begin introducing herself as Falindra Deltos the commando.

"Me happy to meet captain…Fal… Falla… Folinnn…Lind…," Gursk could not wrap his tongue around the asari name.

"Thank you for the promoting me two ranks," said Falindra. "You should be in the admiralty. It's Lieutenant Commander, actually."

"Falla… Foula…" he continued trying, oblivious to her explanation about rank. "Foul!" he reached the name with delight, deciding that this sounded closest to at least one syllable and suited her fine. "Captain Foul." He smiled, fangs exposed, tongue lolling. "Me, Gursk."

"That's been established. May I speak with Professor Haylar in private?"

"Who?"

"Mechano-Man," she clarified.

"Why," Gursk grew suspicious. "You speak about me."

"Actually," Drin interrupted. "Gursk, I want you to sit in the corner. Take your abacus. Use it to find the answer to four times five."

Gursk looked horror stricken. "Shit." He retrieved the abacus from where it fell on the ground when he first rose to confront the intruder. He grabbed the stool that Falindra normally used and placed it in the corner where he sat to solve his appointed puzzle.

Her attention lingered on the vorcha, the three inch fangs in particular, before she turned her gaze to Drin. She already had suspicions why the professor arranged this encounter and found it none to her liking. That Gursk was reviled by his own kin did not translate into her finding him trustworthy. Actually, it might make him less.

"I've already alluded to the favor you need," said Drin, predicting her skepticism. He spoke in asari to satisfy her desire for private conversation. "Not the details, but enough that he knows you want to explore outside or other places where the Drau forbid slaves. He can be trusted." Drin sipped his mushroom tea through his mask's induction port. "I think," he added.

"That last part doesn't put me at ease." She placed both fists on her waist, elbows jutting out. She'd no right to be stand-offish when Drin tried to help. It might prove a diplomatic misstep. Only a few days ago he declared emphatically that he wanted to be left well away from any trouble she planned to stir. Her request clearly fell under the category of trouble. Falindra did not believe she had won the loyalty of a fellow conspirator so quickly, not through the use of her own limited charms. She'd never been the persuasive sort. He had his own motives for being helpful and wanting to escape Yagi was obvious enough; but desire and fear were always in conflict in civilians. If she became antagonistic, he might decide to listen to the fear again. Her professionalism took over.

Her chief advantage was the training she had and that the Dread Claw lacked. In a straight fight the Drau were terrible foes, but they had little talent for military administration beyond beating discipline into rowdy members of the rank and file. Few security protocols were in place and those that the krogan had established were rarely remembered by the vorcha. Oversights provided her a window so long as she was careful. The Dread Claw had the lethal instincts equal to any krogan pirate group. Drau Mar had rammed her against the wall and had knocked the wind out of her lungs, sent her head spinning and he hadn't been trying to seriously hurt her at the time. She didn't doubt that every krogan in the habitat was as physically capable of smashing her bones if she became reckless.

Trusting a vorcha seemed reckless.

"He might help," Falindra continued. "It's the 'might' that gives me pause."

"I've never made a request of him like this before," said Drin. He placed his mug on the work table, refilled, then set it aside before continuing. "I'm not saying that I doubt him, only that I will not guarantee future outcomes without consistent evidence."

It sounded like a mouthful lawyers used to equivocate, but she understood Drin's way of thinking. Another person who refused to make promises was guaranteeing that blame fell on someone besides themselves when the plan backfired. For Drin, though, it was about scientific integrity. He'd never promise guaranteed outcomes without seeing the same event occur thirty times before with identical results. To do otherwise was irresponsible.

When Falindra's arms came to rest at her side, Drin took it as a sign that he'd earned the right to sip from the full mug of mushroom tea. He sighed satisfaction at the flavor, then turned to pour a second mug for Falindra, having decided that the beverage's quality was sufficient for guests.

"What has he done to make the other vorcha hate him?" She asked his back.

The ceiling lights fluctuated. Fans in the air duct whimpered on and off. The power flagged and Drin would soon have to earn his keep, finding the source of the energy failure and fixing whatever latest part broke down. He hesitated before answering.

"He's aquaphobic."

Falindra blinked. Since they wanted privacy they chose to speak in asari instead of relying on the aid of his omni-tool's translation programmes. She mulled over the word. It barely meant anything to her in her native tongue. Had he confused languages? Spoken in volus?

Sensing her confusion, Drin clarified: "he's afraid of water."

Falindra blinked again, still unsure if she heard him correctly. She repeated his words for the sake of confirmation. He nodded. He didn't laugh and she'd have paid serious money to see if there was a grin showing underneath that mask, some telltale sign of a practical joke. "Afraid of water. The barbarian with needle-sharp fangs. A vorcha." The idea was preposterous, more like a poor attempt at misdirection. "I've never heard anything that absurd. They start brawls just to show each other affection. They stowaway on ships, travel across the galaxy without any knowledge of their destination, but this one's afraid of water."

Drin nodded confirmation.

Are they even smart enough to have psychological issues?" She realized too late how offensive the question came out. Her mind evoked the visual of a combat-loving vorcha seeking out the care of professional therapy.

"Don't be quick to dismiss Gursk as a simple primitive," Drin scolded her.

"He isn't, Professor?" They simultaneously looked over to the vorcha. The fingers of his left hand worked to decipher the mysteries of simple arithmetic on the abacus while the index finger of his right hand was nestled deep into his nostril, performing its own work as it wiggled and foraged violently.

To his credit, the professor continued unabashed. "The vorcha are sentient creatures. They have complex psychological needs, habits, and ailments, just like the asari or volus. He undoubtedly faced some traumatic experience when he was younger; or perhaps lived too long in an arid environment and considers bodies of water to be threatening."

"By the smell of him, I don't doubt he finds baths threatening." Once again she regretted the decision to speak. It didn't feel like her to be casually cruel. When she joined the Nefrane her crewmates accepted her, taught her the trade. They listened when she pined for home and indulged her when she'd been naïve and overeager. They had welcomed her. How would she have felt if they challenged her worth or played nasty pranks as she heard happened in the service of other navies? She was not the type of person who flourished in such atmosphere. She had two people offering her aid when they had no reason to be accommodating at all. In fact, it put them at risk. She returned insults for their kindness and disliked herself for it.

"A month ago we thawed ice for use in the habitat. The tank of water broke while Gursk stood nearby. He went into hysterics. That's how everybody learned about his fear." He saw that Falindra's mug was empty before she even realized it and replenished her tea. He was an unfailing host. "The other vorcha are merciless against one of their own who shows fear. He's been alienated by them ever since. Their target of ridicule, as I'm sure you've seen. I can't imagine he has an overwhelming devotion to them."

"Plenty of people hate their families. That doesn't change that they're family." "I'm not sure what that means," said Drin.

"It means nothing," said Falindra absently, resolved to welcome this opportunity. She needed to see the Dread Claw's helium-3 operations and no other opportunity came along.

The wailing alarm that declared morning shifts started in minutes. Those slaves who hadn't crawled from the recesses of where they slept in the tunnels and arrived at the ice processing floor on time would be sought out by the Dread Claw and beaten. The longer it took to find the overdue slave, the more severe the beating. Nobody ever arrived late.

She approached Gursk and waited patiently until he pried his attention away from Drin's gift. "Gursk, you understand what I'm asking of you."

Gursk nodded.

"I want to be taken where I can study the shuttle pad and the helium-3 mining. It's very important to me. But I don't want you to be in unnecessary danger."

"Me always in danger," he hissed. "Me take you at night. Less risk. Lots of secret tunnels only me know. Krogan won't catch us."

The expression 'secret tunnels' and the prospect of being shown them was an unexpected bonus. "And you don't mind doing me this favor even though the other vorcha won't like it."

"Other vorcha don't like me anyway. Me do this for Mechano-Man," he said with great enthusiasm and his eyes became ovals of plain admiration for the scholarly scientist. "Me take Captain Foul to see helium-3. We have fun, see big machines. If you like, we have more fun and blow up big machines," he cackled.

"I'm starting to like you," said Falindra.

He smiled at her approval, then returned to mastering the abacus.


	4. Chapter 4

Falindra arrived at the processing room on time. On time meant that she did not receive any reproachful glares from Drau Gorba. She was panting and had built a small sweat across her brow after running to arrive when she did, but since the Dread Claw had grown used to her exercises; her condition did not seem abnormal.

The day started like every other. She sat at the buck seat assembly and operated the ice drill. Bols, the shorter batarian, sat at the panel that controlled the second drill. Ralik stood beside one conveyor belt sorting through large chunks of rock that managed their way past the larger collector bins, separating them from ice and tossing them away. The task was routine, performed by most slaves, except this time Ralik found his way to a position closest to Falindra. Her tactical instincts recognized that they had her flanked.

She was already concerned about whether Gursk might decide to inform the Drau about their meeting. She was afraid for the professor. If Gursk betrayed her intentions to the krogan, surely Drin would suffer for playing host to their clandestine gathering. It was the first time she'd felt truly anxious since arriving on Yagi. If she knew what Drin Haylar had planned when he invited her this morning, she'd have refused, would have found some other way to find the information she needed without putting him at risk. She worried for him and waited for the krogan to apprehend her – pull her by the arms from the workstation to be pummelled by each krogan until his lust for fisticuffs had been satiated, which would be long after the bruises had left her with any recognizable body parts.

Yes, she was already wary with these concerns so it was no wonder she became defensive when she felt herself surrounded by the two batarians. It had been too much to hope that her good-will gesture toward Ralik had placated them.

She tracked them in her peripheral vision the rest of the morning.

Allowing nerves to get the better of you before the battle begun was foolish, a trap she knew to avoid. The fearlessness Falindra enjoyed as a child, and which terrified her mother, had been lost during the awkwardness of adolescence. Puberty had become a metaphor for panic attacks. It took years to become the master of her mind again.

She settled herself, paradoxically, by scanning the room for other signs of danger. The old routines work best, the training. They become mantras and meditations. Survey the potential battlefield. The salarians and humans who cleaned and packaged ice from the conveyor belts. Vallon, the rusty skinned leader of the salarians stood closest to Ralik. Drau Gorba and his favorite vorcha cohorts were evenly spread throughout the room. The oily vorcha, Milch, paced near the second ice drill and would be on Bols in seconds if the batarians acted out-of-line.

Her nerves settled.

The person with the most dangerous job in the habitat undeniably belonged to one person, the nine year-old human girl, Santina Palomarez. Nobody envied her job.

She possessed a wiry frame and nimbleness that made her able to spring into or wriggle through any crevice she found. And she found them frequently. She cropped up in the strangest places throughout the habitat's tunnels, her head popping out of a hole in the floor, wall, or ceiling, nothing but a smile shamelessly beaming and a tangle of dark hair sprawled across her face when she freed herself from the mess of plaster and rebar. Never mind the secret routes Gursk knew. It was worth a wager that the human girl had discovered her own share.

The krogan recognized her talents and saw to their useful application. It was her job to scurry under the conveyor belts and dislodge chunks of ice and rock that fell between the sprockets. If the debris was not removed quickly then it needled into the rolling wheels, damaging an entire conveyor belt's assembly. Repairs took hours. Possessing only two conveyor belts meant losing half the yield if one became inoperable.

The danger for Santina lay in the fact that the conveyor belts never stopped running while she probed back and forth, scanning for the flotsam and pulling it from the cogs. The decaying pulse alternator that powered the belts hiccupped and sputtered with each rotation that generated the energy needed for the ice operation. It was the size of a small hovercraft situated at the side of the room, a jumble of corroded wires and flickering lights fixed to a gigantic spinning cylinder. Calling it obsolete was a kindness. Turning the machine off then waiting for it each time debris had to be picked out of the conveyor belts wasted hours of daily activities. Cheaper to leave it running and replace the Jaw Jumpers if they lost an arm to the spinning cogs.

That was Santina's title, 'Jaw Jumper'.

The mind needs stimulation, creative musings to alleviate the monotony of tedious labor, and humor to alleviate the misery a wretched existence. Falindra wondered which slave first decided to start giving co-workers job titles. The Drau certainly cared nothing for the titles.

The slaves were happy to provide themselves job titles. The more amusing ones stuck the longest. Those who sifted out useless rock from the ice were on 'Defect Duty'. The man or woman tasked with observing the poorly calibrated safety monitoring systems was the 'Hap Hazard'. Usually, the people on 'Defect Duty' knew when something was about to go wrong before the monitors did. Falindra was the 'Pissy Dentist' when she operated the gigantic drill.

Santina was the 'Jaw Jumper' because the job reminded the humans of daredevils sticking their hands in the mouths of lions. Putting the arm in tested the performer's mettle, but if those jaws ever snapped closed, then muscle reaction became the more important test – audiences either watched the arm jump out of the beastly mouth in time, or disappear in the maw of an animal satisfied to have proven to the watching throng that the appetites of wild carnivores are not so easily tamed for spectacles.

Jaw Jumper. That was Santina. Fearless and quick. Fearless the way Falindra remembered being once, when she was young, too many years back. Falindra had a devoted mother who made the world seem harmless, made it easy to be brave because Falindra always felt safe. Who did Santina have? Surely none of the other humans here hovered around her with the nurturing regard of family. What family member would allow her to prove her tenacity at the risk of dismemberment?

A rock of lime skipped off the unloading ramp by Drill One and bounced into the third cog of the first belt. Santina sprang over, weaved her way past Drau Gorba and one of the vorcha, slid under the belt and deftly snapped her hand in, punching the rock out of place. The rock was jettisoned harmlessly across the floor. Santina wriggled her fingers at the older Jocelyn on 'Defect Duty' to prove all five were still attached, as though she won some bet. She smiled gleefully.

Charval Potes hollered from the other belt. He had yellowish skin and tracks of spots down the front of his neck and eyes that always seemed fixed in a state of worry. Falindra knew him as the individual who advised her against meddling with the fight between Sye and the batarians. Two chunks of lime were rattling between wheels five and six, causing his alarm. He only spoke his own tongue, but necessity transformed gibberish into codes. Santina knew how to say 'limestone', 'ice', and 'help', in six languages.

Lying on the ground from where she dove to strike at the first rock, Santina got to the ball of her foot. She sprung between Drau Hurx's legs then got to a gallop toward the other conveyor, laughing at Hurx's curses from until the laughter took more breath from her lungs than the run. She knew, in theory, that her limbs were in perpetual jeopardy, but it was only theory. The worries that adults used for scolding. She was too quick, too agile for the wheels to ever catch her, for the jaws to swallow her hands.

She crouched by the salarian and held her arm upright. It became a poised rattle snake. Two quick strikes and the rocks of lime were trouble no more, just mundane stones on the ground. Santina smiled at Charval who patted her thicket of dark hair appreciatively. He was amused and fascinated by the mess of growth that extended from her head and fell into her eyes.

She went back to the first conveyor, earning scowls from the vorcha, Kryts, who hated her way of moving about the room faster than he could track. Santina didn't care. She had rocks to watch out for, sprockets to protect. Her services might be called upon twelve times in a single day. She never knew that Drau Gorba and Drau Zugo placed wagers on how long she'd last before losing digits. The previous Jaw Jumpers never lasted so long.

The gas came in slowly. Nobody noticed at first. An acrid smell filled the room, but odors among twenty unbathed slaves, vorcha, and machinery slicked with dirty oil lent a constant, pungent smell to the air. So the gas came undetected.

People began twitching their noses. The exhaust vents were down again. Smog from the ice drills were trapped in the room, building foul, transparent clouds. That traces of cloud were visible at all meant the gas had been accumulating for at least an hour.

Only the two quarian slaves with their sophisticated environmental suits were spared the odor. The volus fringe merchant, Kilne, employed a less sophisticated suit, much to his chagrin. He seemed to suffer worse than anyone. His round body shook violently with every coughing fit caused by the smog.

After the second hour of being exposed people more than twitched. The salarians grew dizzy. Charval Potes nearly fell forward onto the conveyor belt in a burst of vertigo. Some of the humans pressed arms to their guts, trying to keep the contents from coming up.

Santina approached Drau Gorba to ask for reprieve from work on behalf of her fellow ice collectors. None of the other slaves dared, but she was the one unafraid of the daily risk of limbs. She crept toward him. The massive krogan stood aloof, pretending not to notice her. After a moment he stared down, a figure of massive proportions in fat and muscle. His scarred body was the war standard of a hundred battles and countless duels. At three times her height, Santina only came to his knees. He could crush her ribs with the swat of his hand and Gorba proved in the past that such an act gave his conscience little trouble.

He stared down at her with amphibian eyes. "What?"

Santina meekly retreated. She told herself that the nausea she felt was only imagined. Of him she was afraid.

The last hour of the shift was torment. Falindra felt dizzy. She and Bols sat higher than anyone else in the room, nestled in their open cockpits, cocooned where the exhaust floated. When Drau Gorba finally determined that the day's shift had ended, an inexact science for him at the best of times, Bols and Falindra stumbled out of their machinery and each nearly tripped down their respective metal ladders to the ground below.

She had never seen the sour look on the face of a batarian who'd become queasy. His whole face looked pinched. His four eyes became black buttons fixed crossly at some invisible point on his nose. She nearly wanted to laugh, save that she knew she looked no better.

Sye came to her side, putting an arm under the crook of hers for stability. "As your physician, I prescribe plenty of bed rest and no work for at least three days. I'll notify your employer."

Falindra hadn't welcomed the poisoning as a chance for Sye to make a show of chivalry. She was too disoriented to stay on her feet without support. Despite his satisfied smirk, she resisted the impulse to push him away.

"Let me know what Gorba says. He seems the sympathetic type," she said.

What she needed was an opportunity to grab the anti-toxin stored in her left upper shoelace without anyone noticing. With Sye's eyes all over her, it was impossible. She took it as a sign from the Goddess to save the precious single dose for more dire circumstances that might lie ahead.

"I take your meaning. You should at least have someone at your side to look after you for the evening." He offered the most dashing smile in his repertoire of grins. Better than the smile he shared with debt collectors or customs officials or tycoon princesses.

Although the other slaves stood below the worst of the fumes, they all carried possessed the flushed cheeks of the ill. They leaned on each other, and in some cases carried one another away from the work floor. The two quarians grabbed a heavily built human, a Xhosa, Lonwabo Mbatha. One took him by the arms, the other by the human's legs, as if they might swing him, but together they had the strength to carry him out of the room.

The Irish woman, Muriel Brickley, had a salarian half buried into her flank as they walked side-by-side, his chafing against her long, sunshine-colored hair.

Ralik, the tall batarian, carried an unconscious Santina over one shoulder and one of the Armali, Elayda, over the other. She heaved streams of morning's breakfast down his back. Falindra briefly marvelled at the different circumstances under which he had held her at eye level versus Elayda. Zoreen carried the salarian, Murso, across her sharp turian shoulders, his body resting against the nape of her long neck. She coughed and hacked bile and spat discolored fluid into the air, taxing her bio-amp to protect her against the increased toxicity.

Drau Gorba and Zugo made sure to offer mockery, summoning laughter for each slave in turn. Redundant organs and toxin resistant hemoglobin helps to withstand the by-products of malfunctioning machinery.

"How did there people not go extinct a millennia ago," said Gorba.

"Soft people from soft planets," Zugo replied.

The vorcha who were present were also unaffected thanks to their regenerative abilities. Only the slaves suffered. Nothing really surprising in that. Falindra grew angry at the unjust contrast. The building rage brought her senses into focus, made her tap into a distant reservoir of her biotic power even without the aid of a bio-amp. The one useful discovery was that the slaves, when pressed, gave each other aid, regardless of species or fraternal affiliation. She mentally filed this as another piece of useful knowledge.

Gursk arrived just as she and Sye approached the doorway. He'd roamed the tunnels for hours, oblivious to his duties or what transpired. The sight of him reminded Falindra that she had more important concerns than nausea. In her current condition she'd be unable to venture outside the habitat with him tonight. Even if she felt recovered, ten minutes with the ozone air of an oxygen tank and a hazardous environment might cripple her vulnerable body. Puking into a sealed hazmat suit while sneaking about a hostile planetary surface was a peril best avoided.

Delaying, however, might give the vorcha time to take stock of his own risks and reconsider his offer. She had been lucky to have the professor arrange this opportunity and worried that postponement might squander the chance.

She whispered a curse. Sye mistook it for her losing patience with the vorcha in their way and tried to push past him.

"What's wrong with you," Gursk asked.

Falindra, leaning against Sye, coughed and managed: "we've been breathing bad air."

Gursk arched his eyebrows. "Silly asari," he said in all seriousness. "You shouldn't keep breathing if it makes you sick."

She exchanged dumbfounded glances with Sye. There was really no response to offer against that sort of logic. They continued on their way.

As her face came close to Gursk's she muttered in his pointy ear, "tonight's cancelled." She managed in krogan. It was hard to say and not because of her awkward skill with the alien tongue. No matter how prudent her decision, it was demoralizing. Telling him near people who might overhear was another form of recklessness. Sye heard, even if he pretended not to notice. She only hoped that without context, he'd not spend time thinking about it. Better this brief exchange than for someone to witness her and Gursk sharing an unnecessary clandestine rendezvous. Gursk stared blankly, registering her words. At the rate he took to process, Sye might very well figure out the meaning first. The vorcha's face bulged with bewilderment, until the recollection of their plans suddenly returned. He hissed an acknowledgement.

Now she'd have to hope for a quick recovery and continuation of her mission, before she found herself enslaved indefinitely.

She arrived at the operations room still queasy hours after the day's work had ended. The professor groaned at her ill complexion, looking her up and down, gauging how much strength she had left to stay on her feet. He held her hand, guiding her with the surprising gentle force of a nursemaid toward a chair.

Once she sat, his hand let go, but hovered near her leg (he could reach no higher) until he was confident that she remained steady enough to avoid toppling onto the floor.

Falindra rolled her eyes in response to his over-protectiveness. For a scholar, he had the flare for the dramatic. Unless she looked worse than she realized.

He poured her a hot mug of mushroom tea and, with the same customary caution, cupping her hands around the mug until assured she held a firm grasp.

The tea was nectar. The heat and fragrance and thick flavor cleansed her insides, loosened nerves she never realized were as taut as the strings of an instrument. Almost immediately her head began to clear.

"I swear you're getting me addicted," she said.

"Three mugs a day for the past thirty years: it's why I've grown so big and strong."

Falindra tried to glean whether this boast was dry wit or if he genuinely considered himself the Herculean specimen of round, dwarfish volus physique. Erring on the side of civility, she refrained from polite laughter. Drin Haylar was a master of the art of being droll.

He took her wrist and studied it with his fingers. "You've no fever"

"How do you know what asari temperatures should be?"

"Three-fifteen kelvin, is it not?" He surprised her with the quick accuracy. "Though three-ten is common during the second trimester of pregnancy."

Now he was showing off.

"I breathed exhaust, not plague. Why should I have a fever?" She took a second, longer sip of the tea.

"Who knows what circulates in the air here. All sorts of vermin get carried in when the krogan receive supply shipments. Their quarantine protocols are nonexistent. Insects and pests and their miniscule feces drift through poorly recycled air."

"I preferred living without the details." Falindra pinched her face. The last thing she needed was obsessing over thoughts of breathing invisible insect shit.

"Suit your fancy. Personally, I've never been so grateful that my people require our suits when away from home."

"Didn't help the other volus. He had to be dragged from the work floor by the same titan batarian who tried making kindling out of my spine."

She almost stopped herself from mentioning the incident. Other residents fraternized among members of their own species. Salarians among salarians; humans with humans, and so forth. Drin and Kilne were the exception and their mutual avoidance was notable. She disliked reminding Drin of the latter volus if there were bitter feelings. If the professor believed his suit afforded him certain protections, however, obligation demanded she advise him.

"Well no matter," was all he said. If the subject of Kilne bothered him, it didn't show. "Simply a matter of circuits. Nearly always is around here. Charval brought me the circuit board that malfunctioned, causing the ventilation control to breakdown. It's already fixed; be kind enough to return it to him when you leave, please. He'll know how to reinstall it in the fan's assembly."

"Circuits?"

"Computer circuits, actually. The fan has a micro-computer that assesses air quality in and outside of the habitat. It adjusts the fan accordingly. Someone probably thought the fan's efficiency might improve if violently jarred." He grabbed the circuit board from his work table and placed it in her hand. "I give vorcha the same advice I do my first year undergraduate students: computers and punches do not mix. Unfortunately, like the undergraduates, it takes time for complex ideas to permeate their minds."

The krogan provided him with an ample number of repair jobs. He turned his attention toward a planetary navigational system belonging to one of the krogan' armored shuttles. His face loomed close over the device while he studied the components, assessing which tools were needed for the job. He programmed his omni-tool to materialize a heat gun and with his other hand grabbed an old-fashioned pair of needle-nose pliers. For a theoretician he revelled in immersing himself in the labor of a hands-on project.

Falindra enjoyed watching him work, perched on a stool so he could reach the work table, tinkering with a marvellous assortment of tools, the way he held smaller devices inches from his face while he nursed machinery back into operation. Once he became engrossed in a task, fighting for his full attention would be a doomed struggle.

"I just hope that this delay doesn't give Gursk time to reconsider helping me," she said.

"He'll still help you," said Drin, eyes fixed on the shuttle's navigational system. "But not before he completes the multiplication tables I assigned him."

The honey-colored lighting in the room struggled to provide enough illumination to work by. It cast an ambient glow off of Drin's dark green suit, reminding her of some archetypal peculiar-minded inventor scheming in his workshop. Certainly, the room had the disheveled appearance she associated with the residence of an eccentric. Bric-a-brac lay strewn across the floor, most of it rubble from before Drin's arrival. Wide dust trails collected in corners from his half-hearted attempts to sweep the floor. The amount of dust that remained spoke of his impatience for mundane chores. More tools lay about the table than those fixed in their appropriate brackets on the wall. Falindra fought an obsessive urge to return discarded tools back to their proper places. She took a gulp of tea to keep from lecturing him that such slovenliness would never be tolerated on the Nefrane.

She felt well enough to test her balance again, stood up and walked toward the north entry way. Drin stopped puttering to watch that she remained steady. She still refused to use her single dosage of anti-toxin. The lingering effects of the fumes were nearly exorcised; saving the anti-toxin had been the right choice. Who knew what future disaster might strike that would make a broken fan seem mild?

She reached the exit without incident and once her hand grabbed onto the doorframe for support, Drin returned to his task. She took a moment to recollect her strength then made her way toward the south exit hatch – one of the few internal fully intact internal safety hatches.

Red lightning arced across her foot near the room's centre. She looked up. A crack in the ceiling allowed emergency lighting from the Central Storage Room into the Operations Room. There was no emergency. The standard lights in central storage had shorted months ago and no one had thought to repair them. The emergency lights were oddly more radiant than their standard compatriots had ever managed during their short-lived careers. As for that room's floor – and Drin's ceiling – there was no threat of imminent collapse (an unavailable warranty for many other rooms in the station), but it did not look as though it planned withstand any great strain. Gaping holes in the corridors where slaves slept suggested that the integrity of the habitat's flooring faltered with little assistance. A ground tremor caused from orbiting the gas giant, Kobayashi, an industrial accident, heck even a serious brawl among krogan might lead to the ceiling falling apart above Drin's head.

Moon habitats made under budget. Prospectors surely made their investors proud before deserting the place.

The ceiling gave her ideas.

She approached the steam pressure pipes near where she had hidden the 'L' shaped pipe and eased her hand near to test for any heat radiating from them. She felt no warmth and extended her hand closer to be sure.

"What blasted foolery are you doing," Drin bellowed.

Falindra's ribcage jumped from her chest. Who knew that volus had the ability to shout that strongly? She snapped her head toward him. "What's wrong?"

"You silly woman. Is that how you test to see if something is dangerous? By touching it? And if you're worried food is poisonous do you only put a little in your mouth first? Of all the inane methods of experimentation…. Is this the sort of craftiness they train Asari Commandos to have?"

Falindra blushed. It had been years since anyone thought to reprimand her, years more since she'd done anything to warrant it. She wanted to tell Drin that heat radiates, that she'd feel warmth long before she'd risk burning herself. She also wanted to chastise him for calling her 'woman'. The level of anger in his voice advised against making either of these comments.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Drin was not ready to let up. "And if one of those pipes did prove scolding hot and you burned yourself, what then? Mushroom tea is no cure for skin damage and I highly doubt you'd trust the gentle hands of Drau medics."

"Really, professor," she said. The title seemed appropriate. "I'm sorry. I'll be more careful."

Gradually mollified, his shoulders relaxed and voice calmed. "All right then. It's forgotten. But do be cautious in the future."

He returned to fixing the shuttle components, flicking on a bright table light to examine tiny specks of soldering.

Falindra regarded him with a surprise burst of affection. She had to catch herself from going over and throwing her arms in a large hug around his oval body. She was a commando of the Serrice Guard, he was a professor. She'd fought in dozens of military campaigns. He'd fought in great debates. She stood at five feet, seven inches while he barely reached past her waist. But in his moment of indignation he was unafraid to stare her down.

She smiled, feeling better about her predicament than she had in a long while.

"May I borrow your cutting torch," she asked.

He offered it without hesitation. Evidently, her carelessness truly had been forgotten already, thanks largely to his preoccupation with mechanical tasks.

She used a stool as a step-ladder and began cutting a hole in the ceiling directly overhead of the pipes. The ceiling crackled and spat yellow sparks as the cutting torch pierced it with little effort. In moments she had access to a corner of Central Storage near Reclamation. The extra route out of Drin's repair shop provided tactical options.

She pulled herself up and into the cargo hold. The room was silent and deserted. Empty cargo bins of different sizes were spread throughout. The red glow of the emergency lights cast false menace against dust and wasted perishables. The latter left behind the lingering smell of something sharp and pungent.

A tattered blanket and crude bed made from insulation rested in the opposite corner. A pair of humans dwelt in this room, but far enough from the hole that it would likely go unnoticed. To reduce those chances further Falindra eased an empty crate over the hole. There was little appeal to exploring the room. Anything of value that once stored there had long ago been plundered. Falindra's eased herself off the stool, feet wobbling once she was on the ground. Her strength ebbed and the dizziness returned.

Drin never asked why she needed the cutting torch or about the hole in the ceiling hidden above the steam pipes. He never even turned to look at what kept her busy. She no longer had the power to resist asking. "Why are you being so kind to me? When we first met you demanded I leave you in peace. It's appreciated, believe me, but you've been awfully helpful for someone who vowed against providing help."

She needed to know for two reasons. Prudence demanded she unveil the mystery in case it became a security issue for her. Also, she was irresistibly curious. His initial peevishness took an abrupt turn in only a few days. It was impossible for him to feign ignorance when she borrowed tools without explanation. People didn't make large holes in ceilings to relieve boredom. Her request to visit the shuttle pad and helium-3 operations were not a tourist's fancy.

Drin dropped tools on the table and placed his arms at his sides, composing himself while he considered the question.

"I thought you came to me that first day simply to enjoy mushroom tea," he quipped.

"You knew better."

He let out a harmonic sigh that sounded faintly mechanical through his sealed mask. "When you first asked for help and I refused you had this expression," he said. "Not anger or defeat, but," he searched for the right word. "Resolution. That's what you had. People have come to me with plots of escape, most of them ludicrous and begging to be discovered by the Drau. Usually they relied on me to build impossible contraptions. When I refuse they become irate and curse me. Some cry instead. Some beg or try blackmail. But you did none of these. You didn't care that I wouldn't help you; it was an inconvenience at most.

"I knew then that you had every intention of continuing with your schemes. I'd rather be involved and know what's happening then uninvolved and surprised."

The answer was frank, even pragmatic, but Falindra was unconvinced. As he said, every indentured servant in the habitat dreamed of escape and he had no reason to believe hers were any more attainable than the others.

"You're an officer of the Asari navy and a member of the Serrice Guard. Your plans of escape have more credence," seeming to glean her thoughts. She found it rattling, unfair that a man whose genius lay in the physical sciences also had a keen grasp of psychology. He'd be frightful as a trained interrogator.

"So you are hoping to escape with me?" she said.

"I'm not finished." He stepped closer.

He tilted his head back to look her in the eyes, unabashed by their difference in height, carrying the confidence that allowed him to orate in front of an audience of hundreds. "It's remotely possible that whatever plans you have of escape might work. It's more probable that you'd at least give the Dread Claw no small amount of trouble before they, uh, killed you." He added the last part apologetically. "Either way have you considered what will happen to the other slaves?"

Falindra did not respond.

"The reprisals against them shall be fierce. The Drau will abuse them and take the leash off their vorcha, whose cruelties will be savage. Any small measure of freedom currently enjoyed will be stripped. No more sleeping where we find space. Eating dinner with friends and fraternizing when work ends. The krogan will likely chain slaves to the conveyor belts.

"I never thought myself a man who'd beg," he continued. "Amazing how it has become habit. I begged the university to continue funding my research. Now I'm begging you: think about your intentions before acting on them. Saving yourself will be a misery for others."

Falindra kept silent until he finished. She'd never been one to jockey for place in conversation. Her superiors and subordinates on the Nefrane had thought her quiet, but she preferred to let people express the entirety of their thoughts and, in exchange, if she felt she possessed a notion worth sharing, hoped to be given the same respect. Once the professor began sharing what was on his mind, the gates wouldn't close. It became confession.

When he concluded Falindra wondered whether he'd provoked her to anger or admiration. Would she curse obscenities or offer him a sincere salute?

Had he really believed that her entire ambitions ended with the goal of escape? Did he think so little of the Serrice Guard that he believed her priority was only her own survival? Or that she might callously disregard the lives of twenty captives forced into slavery? She was no Council Spectre, her soul scarred by the indignities of black-ops, or of weighing the number of expendable civilians against the virtue of political objectives. She was a member of the Serrice Guard. Four thousand years of tradition as the elite soldiers of her republic were built in that name and she held the protection of its honor dearly.

It was comical that he presumed she worried about trying to escape. She could have disappeared the second day after she arrived. Countless times since. As much as the krogan were deadly individual warriors, as wardens, their security protocols were inadequate at best. Escaping on her own was no challenge. She had no intention of leaving without every slave coming with her. It was the only reason she remained so long. Plus, she still needed to get a look at the helium-3 extractors.

Before she dwelled on the injury to her unit's pride, or her own honor, Falindra remembered that Drin asked her to think about the other slaves. A thousand other men in his position would have asked to join the escape without giving the other slaves' thought a moment of consideration.

The sweet, naïve professor actually thought the Drau would take their frustration out on slaves with a few extra helpings of kicks and punches. Despite his genius, he had little understanding of the mind of a Terminus pirate. It was more likely that they'd simply kill all the slaves, from the professor to Santina, if only to assure that no one was left alive to spread tale of the Dread Claw's blunder. Far easier to abduct new slaves.

She refused to let that happen. The hole in the ceiling, the shuttle pad, the rewiring of the ice drill, her fight with Hastings, her morning jogs, they'd all been done to prepare for the escape of every slave in the habitat.

She crouched and held his hands in her own. "The Serrice Guard rescue victims; we don't add to their misfortune."

He twisted his hands so that they covered hers instead. Holding them firmly, he gave her a grateful nod.

Falindra thought of telling him about her mission at that moment. The Caleston Wake concerns, the helium-3 being secretly collected across a half dozen worlds, or that she'd been looking specifically for him. She thought of telling him that a professor and a commando held something in common. They'd both been betrayed, only he did not realize it. But she kept quiet. He seemed at ease now that his worries had been unburdened. She wanted him to enjoy that peace a little longer.

"Let me help you fix the navigational computer for Bodix's shuttle." She approached the work table and retrieved a set of pliers.

"You have experience with repairing electronics?"

"Oh I'll have it operating exactly the way it's needed." She flashed a smile that promised mischief ahead.


	5. Chapter 5

It happened three days later, the opportunity which, after a month since her arrival, she grew eager to find.

The excitement amid the krogan was palpable, an invisible force like the winds of a torrential gale, and it stirred the slaves. It happened in the nebulous hour too early to be called morning, too close to dawn for being night. The excessive patter of determined feet reverberated through the ceiling above Falindra's head where she slept.

The salarians who slept a little further down the tunnel whispered incessantly amongst themselves. Green-skinned Murso, the former merchant captain, stared intensely toward the ceiling. Timid Charval pressed his face against the slit of a narrow window.

Sye came into the access node that linked the north and central tunnels, accompanied by several humans: the contrasting duo of plump Muriel Brickley and lean Lonwabo Mbatha, and the younger, freckled Louis Salmond. Small Santina traipsed behind them. The human group frantically chattered into Sye's right ear while the salarian camp gabbed into his left. He translated back and forth, trying to keep up as the lot of them speculated about the Dread Claws' hectic stirrings in the rooms above.

Falindra already reached her conclusions. The Dread Claw mobilized raiding parties on rival habitats in early hours because it provided the optimum conditions for travel through Yagi's dust saturated air. The one prepared now sounded larger than any undertaken since Falindra arrived on planet, large enough that the other slaves fretted as though it were some prophetic sign of doom.

She kept her shoes tied around her wrists, secured from theft while slept. Curious to see what took place above, she slipped on her shoes, slipped out of her nook, past the small throng of gossipers, and was at the node's exit before the crowd realized the shadowed bulge of her body no longer rested under the makeshift blankets at her end of the tunnel. She'd have departed unnoticed entirely, but the corridors were too restrictive.

"Where are you going," said Sye. His gaze found its way toward her often enough that he was inevitably first to detect her absence from the improvised bed.

"I want to see what they're doing," she murmured.

"I can tell you from here," said Sye. "No reason to abandon the comforts of a frigid tunnel. They're going on a raid. Nothing new."

She cast him a quizzical stare. If the raid was so routine why did the lot of them look so frazzled?

"It's bigger."

Santina skipped toward Falindra and cast a round, eager expression, impatient for Sye to translate the request bursting from her mouth.

Falindra understood the request clearly enough without Sye's assistance. She motioned with her palms, pushing firmly into the air toward the girl. 'Stay here. You cannot come with me'. Santina's shoulders slouched with her deflated craving for adventure.

Falindra left the humans and salarians behind and sprinted out of the tunnels and into the access corridor of Building A, through the deserted processing room, past the drills, into the next chamber, stopping outside the small, defunct quarantine room. The emptied medical supplies crate against the wall gave her the perch she needed to peer through the rectangular window half way up the wall.

She peered into the assembly room that led to the shuttle pad in time to see Drau Zugo, distinguished by his bright red head crest, smack a clip into his Striker rifle. He grinned with satisfaction at the snapping sound as it clicked into place. Beside him Drau Telx fastened grenades onto the clips of his bandolier with one hand; the other hand was in its customary position mining his nostrils. Next to them her favorite krogan, Drau Mar, gave his shotgun a once over. The skull tattoo across his face grimaced. They stood at the centre of a ring of armed compatriots doing weapons checks, nine krogan and seven vorcha. The leathery skinned vorcha, Skeb, brandished a Firestorm. The cruel flamethrower made Falindra's stomach turn even to think about. She'd seen the carnage those weapons reaped upon their targets.

Drau Bodix stood at the apex of the ramp that led out to the shuttle pad. He gazed over the gathering. His pockmarked, acid-burned faced betrayed no sign of approval or eagerness, only grim, reptilian lethality. The Dread Claw mobilized.

Falindra wasted no time slipping down from her perch and running back through the tunnels. She raced into Building B and down the stairwell that led to the operations room. She burst from one dilapidated, rusted path to the next, energized by instincts telling her that with the majority of the Dread Claw away for a jolly old time berserking, an ideal chance for intelligence gathering became available.

She found Drin in the operations room right where she expected, seated on his stool and, at the early hour, providing his secret pupil desperately needed tutelage. It was, of course, the student who Falindra wanted to find. She took his presence there as the Goddess sending good omens. He'd been down in the sublevel where she had free access, unmissed by the other vorcha, rather than in the warded off Dread Claw quarters.

"Gursk," she called to him tentatively, interrupting his studies.

He sat, legs folded, beside the stool, abacus in his lap. "Yes, Captain Foul."

"Drau Bodix is leading Dread Claw on a raid."

"Yup." He provided Drin the abacus to approve his calculations.

"You're not going with them? They didn't select you take part in the raid."

"Me never chosen," he pouted. "Bodix says me not good enough. Always chooses Skeb first, then Trelg. After that comes Kryts and Vhisk and Milch. Me always last. Me remain to patrol tunnels and guard."

Drin complimented the demonstration of improved subtraction skills, refusing to allow the commando's covert mission to interrupt the conclusion of class. He examined her coolly while he returned the abacus to the vorcha. They were a level below and on the far side of the oblong habitat from the grouping of Dread Claw and still the din of revved shuttle engines and thrusters that warmed to life reverberated through the walls.

"They may not trust you with important missions," said Falindra. The request froze on her tongue stopped by a roadblock. She fumbled for diplomatic words that conveyed how important the request was to her. She wished for oratory skills that would leave her arch enemies clamoring to give her aid. Technically speaking, Gursk still fell under the category of 'enemy'. There was no clever way to say it. All that remained was for it to be said.

"But I do trust you." She tried convincing herself it was true. "Will you help me sneak outside to look around?"

Gursk stood up. He hyperextended his knees in a series of quick stretches, placing hands on each knee in turn while the other leg slid behind his body. "Sure." The word came out deep and long and as close as Falindra ever expected to hear a word hissed with congeniality.

"Me have hazard masks ready. Follow," he instructed.

His willingness to proceed with the promised help came so quickly that an anxious pit grew in Falindra's stomach. There was no reason to trust him. The professor vouched for his student's reliability, but ambush more likely awaited her if she followed him than the assistance that surely branded Gursk a rogue if they were discovered by another member of the gang. It seemed awfully foresighted of him to prepare hazard masks for the occasion. Did it indicate that someone else gave Gursk directions that led to a trap?

If the Dread Claw wanted her dead they hardly needed to lure her with elaborate deceptions. Whatever laws they held dear among Clan Drau, they did not extend rights or jurisprudence to her. If they wanted her dead, it was a simple matter of pointing their rifles. What had Mar said though? That she'd been brought to them with explicit instructions that she be kept alive. Alive until some unknown associate came to retrieve her. That was the part that gave her chills.

Mar shared that fact while explaining his inclination for sending her to the grave, if only for his own peace of mind. He needed a pretext. .

"One moment, I'm not ready." Drin's contributed unexpectedly.

She and Gursk both looked down at the squat volus simultaneously. Neither of them expected that the professor had any desire to join them in the hostile environment and rough terrain of the cratered moon. He never expressed an interest while arranging the association between the asari commando and vorcha brigand.

"Ready for what?" Falindra hoped he merely meant to offer some provisions, or maybe give some secret volus ceremonial 'good luck' chant. Unfortunately she knew he meant otherwise.

"Lieutenant Commander," began Drin.

"Uh, Captain Foul," Gursk corrected.

Drin avoided becoming peevish at the interruption. "The moment you step outside the habitat, you risk summoning the wrath of the Drau upon not just your head, but on every slave if you're caught. They'll do it simply to be punitive. I told you this. If they discover your intentions, the punishment will be more severe. You made me a promise about the welfare of the other slaves. Forgive me, but I intend to safeguard that welfare."

Falindra's cheeks flushed. She felt the heat rise in her face. It came down to the fact that he held a seed of mistrust, suspected she cared only for her own escape, or some act of sabotage, regardless of who remained to face the aftermath. The honor of the Serrice Guard had been questioned. Worse, she'd been personally insulted. She had developed an unexpected affection for Drin Haylar, found him to be someone who immediately, in his peculiar way, won her respect. Now she learned that these sentiments were not wholly reciprocated.

She breathed deeply before allowing impulse to guide her first response. Diplomacy was not her finest talent, but Serrice Guard mantras served in more than one setting. Be patient and appraise the situation; acting on impulse means danger is allowed to grow beyond control. That's when misfortune strikes.

So far she had been the one asking Drin for all the favors, had proven to hold secrets and agendas. In return, she offered implausible promises. Cynicism did not suit the man who enjoyed tinkering with circuits or hoped to power civilization by harnessing a lightning bolt. When you lose your job, see your dream project ridiculed, get attacked by pirates, and become enslaved, you were allowed latitude on developing a bitter mistrust toward new acquaintances.

"What do you need?" she asked, and finally decided that his company was going to prove useful.

She had hoped to acquire an omni-tool somehow by now, especially after she had slipped her only tracking device on Drau Mar's, but the opportunity to pilfer one never came. Drin Haylar boasted one with respectable diagnostic programming.

"My walking stick." He went to the corner of the room and fetched a length of rebar fitted with rubber grips leaning against the wall.

He looked the part of an archeologist, ready to hike through chasms and dig for bones. She refrained from mentioning that 'walking sticks' were not ordinarily used in commando training for reconnaissance operations.

Gursk led them through the corridor toward the sub-level node, then up the stairs and into Cargo Room 2. He went behind empty crates and derelict machines and came to another set of doors. He pried open the ineffective lock with his claw and opened the doors. Their old hinges squealed with rust. He took them down a long tunnel that ran along the width of Building B until they final came to the room that essentially gave life to the whole habitat, the location of the power generators.

The room was a labyrinth of metal. Rows of cylinders and turbines crowded the floor, reaching to the ceiling, crisscrossed by gigantic ball bearings. In an ideal room of this sort, people heard the smooth, mechanical hum of the generators. What Falindra heard was the hum punctuated by eroded hiccups. Sometimes the sound cut out entirely for several frightful seconds, before a turbine belched itself into resurrection. She smelled burnt metal.

Gursk deftly stepped through a mess of oil spills and upturned bins of spare parts. Falindra mentally catalogued the latter as she passed and snatched a few useful items, stuffing them in the rucksack she thought to bring, before she followed the vorcha. He weaved his way through cables that dangled from the tops of generators. Falindra followed without losing pace, imagining that they foraged through some demented version of trees and hanging vines of a robotic rainforest. Broken gauges rested on a panel at waist height, estimating the health of the equipment from a bygone, better year.

Another set of doors shown at the far wall. Approaching the last series of generators, Gursk ducked under a cluster of cables that had drooped low, then held them up for the others to pass through. "Watch your step, Mechano-Man."

"Yes, my titanic height does prove to be a hindrance." Drin gave the vorcha a friendly pat on the side.

Falindra looked back through the route they had taken. "Doesn't Drau Bodix have guards placed here? Even with so many leaving on the raid, someone ought to be posted nearby. The slaves easily have access to the area and he can't trust a simple lock to keep them away from tampering with the generators."

"What slaves going to do, turn off power? Dread Claw wait in shuttles. Slaves die. Dread Claw come back inside."

The answer was baffling. It held bestial logic in its simplicity. The krogan would easily retake the power room if slaves seized it. Half-starved humans and salarians had no chance of keeping krogan warriors at bay. But the possibility of slaves taking the room should have been denied in the first place. Aboard the Nefrane the crew never left the brig unguarded. It simply lacked the good sense of any security practice.

"Hey," Gursk stopped walking. "You two want to see something special?"

Falindra and Drin exchanged worried glances. Somehow, the question inevitably became unsettling when uttered from a mouth that held such long fangs.

"Depends how special," Falindra hesitated.

The cue was good enough. He leaped half way up one of the generators and climbed. It lacked any sort of footholds, not being designed with the idea that someone might choose to needlessly climb dangerous machinery for sport. He wrapped his arms and legs around it as best he could and shimmied upward, claws scraping metal.

When he reached the top he bunted a ceiling fan with his head. The screws that held braces in place were stripped. The whole fan creaked out of its frame. Gursk was unbothered by the fact that the fan was still on when he rammed his head into it. One blade skidded across the top of his head before the next one became caught against the side of his skull. The motor sputtered, trying unsuccessfully, to rotate the stuck fan blades. He reached upward into the dark recess beyond the blades and pulled own a long, aluminum alloy box.

He jumped to the ground, gave his cohorts an eager smile that conveyed, 'bet you can't wait to see what's inside' and opened the container.

Falindra stared, dumbfounded. After several long seconds passed she realized that her mouth had gone slack. She suspected that, underneath the mask, Drin's mouth had done the same.

"What is that?" Drin demanded.

Gursk happily displayed his slapdash collection of randomly gathered keepsakes.

It looked as though he at one time chanced upon a human supply depot and had appropriated the items of greatest value (according to the demented tastes of a neurotic). He completed his collection over time by retrieving discarded knickknacks from the garbage bins of shopping centres. Ripped books, broken toys, chipped dishware, fake jewelry, torn sweaters, he amassed them all and somehow managed to keep them crammed into a box that now seemed not nearly large enough to hold its burden. It was a magic box, bigger on the inside than on the out, able to hold vast quantities of junk far exceeding what the laws of a three dimensional universe allowed. Simply opening the box permitted the articles of clothing to stretch to a more comfortable volume, and caused toy cars to somersault to the ground.

While the spectacle was enough for Drin to mutter words of wonderment, something else caught Falindra's attention and left her gaping. That honor belonged to Gursk's prized possession, wrapped in sweaters and news magazines, the 'something special'. He brushed off the protective layers and proudly held out the assault rifle for them to admire.

"This is Roumba and it's my friend." Gursk finally answered the question.

And what a friend. Roumba was not just any average rifle. Gursk sported in his hands a modified M-37 Falcon mini-grenade launching rifle.

'Modified' was the most generous euphemism ever contrived.

He'd painted tiny images along the barrel with the skill of a farsighted toddler (and like such children's works, Falindra was loath to guess what the images represented in case she proved wildly wrong. Was that a cat or a flower?). He had glued several inch-high toys – tiny dolls and action figures – along the barrel and buttstock. A small, fuzzy, droopy head of a stuffed animal had been slathered in glue to keep it in place, smothering the rear sight and rendering its aim assistance useless. Finally, plugged into the extension port that might allow the weapon to be connected to an omni-tool for enhancements, he'd plugged in a string of festive, multi-colored lights that were wrapped around the length of the weapon. The rifle looked ready to destroy its enemies with gaiety and mirth. In essence, he had taken one of the deadliest firearms fielded by any military and done nearly everything conceivable to make it less effective.

Falindra finally managed to articulate a question. She took a while deciding which one to ask first and how. She had intended to sneak outside as quickly as possible, but this left her dumbstruck.

"You keep this here. In a room where any of the slaves have access if you forget to lock a single door," she said.

"Me can't leave it in Dread Claw quarters. One of the krogan might steal it."

When Falindra's supervisor, Talere, tutored her in the fundamentals of the Serrice Guard, she emphasized never to depend upon your enemy being prone to stupid mistakes or success will always elude you. Talere had never been to Yagi. She would be unable to provide any explanation for Gursk.

"It's your friend," Falindra repeated, wondering if the crude understanding of Drau Krogan she had acquired failed her. She looked to Drin for confirmation.

"Yes," said Gursk. "My only friend before me met Mechano-Man and Abacus and Captain Foul." He hugged the rifle against his chest.

"Well, you know, Gursk, I'd like to be its friend too."

Drin elbowed her in the side. He aimed for a lower rib, but because of his short stature, accidentally struck her in the ass instead. She slapped his shoulder and he slapped her leg.

"May we proceed on our journey," Drin said, irritated. The anxiety of sneaking about already worked on his nerves.

"Thank you for sharing, Gursk" Falindra sighed. "You may as well hide the rifle again. If we're discovered, it will only draw trouble and I'm not ready for a gunfight. Sorry Roumba," she added with subtle humor for his benefit, looking at the Falcon assault rifle.

Gursk gave the rifle a pitiable caress, whisper-hissing condolences to the weapon in a manner indeterminably either adorable or disturbing. He reluctantly parted with the rifle once it had been freed from the dark confines of its hiding space. He retrieved a pair of breathing masks, then packed the other belongings and returned the box above the ceiling fan.

She double-checked that the professor remained willing to proceed before they moved on to the next set of doors. A final access route revealed an external air hatch at the far end. There was no lighting, only the creeping angles of shadow cast by light from the previous room that found its way down the tunnel, barely bright enough to reveal the tunnel's neglect. Corroded power lines and fuse boxes adorned the walls, once intended for an extension of the facility that never materialized.

Falindra strapped the breathing mask around her head and powered on the miniature air supply, a small tank with shoulder mounts that fit under her shirt. It was a four hour supply, less than she wanted but more than she'd be able to use in one outing anyway. Without a full environmental suit, radiation from Kobayashi would become debilitating before she depleted the oxygen supply.

"Maybe we shouldn't go," said Gursk.

"Excuse me," Falindra's stomach did somersaults. She expected Drin to flinch at their undertaking before the final plunge beyond the safety of walls, but not the vorcha. This close to exploring outside and her guide decided to turn back at the final juncture. He began pushing past her to return to the generator room.

Did fear of being discovered by other members of Dread Claw finally overwhelm him, or was this some planned betrayal that served a different purpose? She blocked his path, appraising the motives that a facial twitch or averted eye might reveal.

"Me turn around. Let's go back," he persisted.

"We're at the outer latch, Gursk. Why turn back? You promised."

"You go. Way is shown, me turn back." He whimpered and stared morosely down the tunnel.

Falindra followed his gaze. Twenty meters in, about half way down, the light caught a small pool of water. The detail had been too irrelevant to register when she first scanned the tunnel. Wetness covered a patch of ground, golden pearls of reflected light against the water's surface, like a paved street after a storm. Water drops pattered rhythmically as they from corroded pipes that ran the length of the ceiling, likely connecting to pipes in the professor's workroom. The drops formed what barely could be called a puddle. There was no recess in the ground deep enough to allow for a puddle; but by trick of the angle of ambient light it appeared as impenetrable a murk as the sea.

"Is it the water?" she asked. "Are you reluctant because of the water?"

Gursk barked a defensive protest. "No. No, me just think bad idea to go now." Another whimper escaped uncontrollably.

The professor was right. Aquaphobic, he called it. She never expected to find a vorcha with such a condition. It was strange that creatures notorious for their reckless ferocity could have psychological vulnerabilities. Here was one cowed by the most mundane element of the world.

She had no intention of allowing the puddle to become an obstacle and walked down the tunnel, her footfalls deliberately loud. She thumped her foot against the concrete with each step. The sound of shoe hitting ground – not water – retorted. She stopped over the puddle and casually circled a few steps. The water never reached past the soles of her shoes.

"If you thought that Drau Gorba might find us, then maybe we should reconsider. If that's the reason you're turning back. I thought maybe we couldn't pass the water, but that's not the reason because there's really no water here, so I guess it must be the krogan."

Gursk shifted his feet about and scratched his head, a parody of deep thought. "No, me reconsider. Still pretty safe. We continue."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. Wish me brought Roumba, though."

His silhouette moved across the threshold, his head pointed toward the ceiling to avoid staring at the sight which caused his unease. He muffled a cry once when his feet sloshed through the shallow puddle, but kept going. Drin followed. She looked behind them to be sure none of the remaining Dread Claw in the habitat had followed, bursting into the room, hollering with rifles pointed. The tunnel had no room for cover.

Nobody came.

She had checked to make sure that rampaging pirates did not follow. Relived that none appeared, she missed the person who watched and chose to remain silent. Unseen.

The inner air hatch moved with ease. They closed it behind them, opened the external hatch, and stepped into the hostile outdoors of Yagi.


	6. Chapter 6

Falindra admired stars.

By the end of their first tour some naval cadets found that stars became a tedious sight. Other observers looked upon the cosmos and reduced the vistas before their eyes to something mundane: gasses and radiation and particles and the unfathomable emptiness in between. The void that engulfed them all. Veteran spacefarers acquired eyes only for the established FTL routes and the remote regions that news bulletins warned avoiding because of piracy or natural hazards.

For Falindra the wash of stars never stopped being the enchantment she first saw from her childhood bedroom window when meteor showers sprinkled across the firmament and into the hills. She spent weeks hoping to track their landings. Her mother joked that Falindra became a space sailor to discover where those meteors witnessed in her youth first came from.

She never tired of staring into the cosmos. The kaleidoscopic nebulae painted by the Goddess with a thousand colors and a thousand brushstrokes. Kingly gas giants of swirling colors and a crown of rings, and the satellites with whom they shared court.

The sight in front of them gave wonder and demanded humility. The gas giant, Kobayashi, commanded half the sky. The depths of space were the background bedchamber of the titan. It shined with vivid swirls of indigo and carmine and sunburst orange, a godly thing that dwarfed its collection of moons.

Yagi was closer to its parent planet than she realized. It orbited within the fringes of its E ring. Colossal chunks of ice drifted all across the sky like floating crystals of strange faerie tale. Further beyond a score of other moons meditated in their orbits.

Falindra wanted to pray, to sit and savor the scene. Her lips shaped a silent thank you to the Goddess, to the universe that humbled and shared its grandeur. She became conscious of every stretch of her body: feet and fingers, the air in her lungs.

Gursk and Drin each took private moments to pause and relish the panorama. No sentient creature might pass under it without giving pause to awe. She felt an uncontrollable grin form under her mask. After a while, Drin hesitantly approached. He respected her state of reverie too much to interrupt. He came into view, allowed his presence to be felt, and waited for her to respond.

When she was ready she crouched down and squeezed his shoulder. "Thank you for this."

"Let's find your helium-3 extractors," he said. "Preferably before radiation poisoning sets in."

"Wise plan." She checked the gauges on the oxygen tank. It gave optimal readings.

The krogan shuttles were fiery dots in the distance when the trio began their hike wide around perimeter. They scaled down a small ridgeline to avoid direct sight from the habitat. She doubted the remaining members of Dread Claw thought to peer outside but the cluster of slaves who fervently conjectured about the raids was another matter. She just assumed not be spotted by one of them. It invited gossip and question she may wish to avoid; and there was always the chance one might report the sighting to one of the krogan in hopes of currying favor.

With her first look at the habitat from the outside she saw that it was not the simple oblong that design specs for the model suggested. Damage had stripped the middle of its protective outer layer, leaving the building bisected. Buildings A and B were attached by several umbilical alloys. It was plain to see from the construction that proverbial and literal corners were cut, or ignored entirely. To make reduce development costs, regulations become forgotten far from the oversight of Citadel Space. The facility's deteriorated state now made far more sense. The building was only a few decades old, but no advanced applications had been applied to protect it against the local environment.

She saw three external hatches from her vantage point, the one they had used in Building B, another situated near the security room, and a third jutting from the second level of Building A for an extension of the facility that never materialized. The hatch to the shuttle pad was on the far side.

That was her last view of the facility for half an hour as they walked below the ridge line. Their feet left impressions in the yellow sand drifts. Drin wielded his walking stick with absent-minded indulgence rather than genuine need. Gursk led the way. Another hour passed and she worried about the time they still had available. She hadn't expected the journey to take them so far.

"Are you sure about where we're going," she asked.

"Me sure," Gursk responded from ten paces in front. "Wait." He stopped walking abruptly, pointed ahead, then pointed toward another direction to their left, motioned up and down with each arm slowly to measure his judgments. "No. Wait. Yeah, all good. Me sure."

If his goal was to make her heart skip, he succeeded. She rolled her eyes.

"How long until Drau Bodix returns?" She asked. She did not voice any criticisms aloud, but Drin slowed them down. He tried keeping up, and braved the rough terrain without complaint, even when it was clear that such a hike was an unfamiliar challenges. His legs were simply too short to sustain him at the pace she wanted.

"Bodix attacking turians on far side of moon. If still alive, won't be back until near nightfall," Gursk said. "If killed may not come back at all," he added with deductive prowess.

The news brought some relief. It didn't mean they enjoyed the luxury of a lengthy stroll. Any one of the habitat's residents might notice the trio's absence after a while and get curious. Besides, they had three hours before the day's routine labors began. If she was not on the drilling floor by then, one of the Dread Claw overseers was bound to notice. They might care little about the slaves' stirrings during the evening, but they took careful stock of who failed to show for assigned duties come daybreak. Then again, after three more hours she'd be too ill from radiation exposure to care. The one consolation to the time it took to traverse the terrain was that the raider shuttles were unlikely to make a surprise return overhead.

"Why did you join the Dread Claw," Falindra asked of her guide. The time might as well be passed with her learning about the vorcha whom she had entrusted both her mission and her life.

"Me lived on Rosh when Drau Bodix came and rounded up vorcha miners. He said we join Dread Claw or he kill us all. Me thought it over some and decided first choice better."

The only part of his synopsis that surprised her was someone trying to employ vorcha as miners. Then again, Gursk might describe what the vorcha did on Yagi as mining. Between his recruitment and the current treatment he received from other members of the pirate group, it was understandable if the Dread Claw failed to earn his loyalty.

After nearly two hours had elapsed since they came out of the outer hatch, they climbed an ascent out of the ravine and Gursk directed them to look beyond the ice collectors.

Hundreds of dark specks in the distance flew in oval patterns across Kobayashi's outer atmosphere. Too small to be seen in detail, they might have been mistaken for cast-offs from planetary rings except they moved counter to any natural orbit. They were drones, teams of them collecting helium-3 from Kobayashi's upper atmosphere and returning it to one of four processing towers that drifted partially hidden in the rocky debris of the gas giant's B-Ring. The towers were floating skyscrapers, each one a highly advanced, automated series of complex computers, stabilization elements, compressors, and customized containment units. Each one, at full capacity could process and store a quantity of helium-3 worth hundreds of billions of credits, enough to power a warship for a year.

A ring of automated weapons platforms circled the towers.

"It's unbelievable." Drin was nearly breathless from the sight of such an advanced operation, although the exercise making their way here shared some of the blame.

"Please believe, Mechano-Man," said Gursk. "No trick. Me not put them machines there. Them real gas-grabbers."

Falindra knew the professor was bound to realize that the discovery led to some critical questions. The most obvious one came down to this: why did the Dread Claw waste time with a pitiful, subpar ice mining operation when they had access to one of the latest, most streamlined, high-tech helium-3 stations in modern industry at their disposal?

"Professor, may I borrow your omni-tool," Falindra requested. He unslung the device from his wrist and handed it to her without uttering a word.

She strapped it on and a surprise wave of assurance rippled through her with the feel of having equipment at hand. She'd been without her tools for too long, the bio-amp being paramount, but only one of several devices stolen, most likely by Walbeck before he dumped her into care of the Dread Claw.

She punched a few commands into the omni-tool with her fingers, testing Drin's configuration, brought up a holo-projection of available programs and hardware. She accessed the camera zoom features and began capturing images of the helium-3 operation.

"The Dread Claw don't own this. The krogan are devoid of this level of industry," Drin said when he finally found his tongue again. "Aren't they?" He sounded ready to believe lunacy if it scratched the itch of impossible riddles. "No corporation or government would allow such a facility to be captured by pirates.

"Of course not," said Falindra. She captured more images before setting the omni-tool to an automated mode. It collected hundreds of images faster than she had a hope to gather manually. Afterward, she switched to video. The operation was further away than she liked so she kept taking pictures and videos and hoped later examination revealed details that escaped the organic eye at this distance. She needed specifics: models, adaptations, component types, serial numbers, logos.

"Well," he barked, exasperated by her flippant response. "Then who does own them?"

"Good question, professor. Now you understand why I needed to come here."

"Do you know the answer?"

Once the omni-tool's image capacity had been filled, she sat down on a rock and asked absently for Drin to save the data without yet answering his own question. Drin accepted his omni-tool gingerly. She made a quick study once more of the set-up. The difference in technological quality between the helium-3 and ice collectors was laughable.

"Professor, have you heard the expression, 'Caleston Wake'?"

He struggled up onto a rock for his own seat. He tried hiding the fatigue in his legs, but his noisome respirator betrayed the rapid intakes of breath. After years as the paragon in his field of studies, recognized authority in several specialties, and rarely straying from these interests, his embarrassment of being the ranked novice in an activity was palpable. Falindra spent decades disciplining her body. Gursk endured constant survival challenges as a natural element of vorcha culture. Drin's athletic routines consisted of striding across an auditorium floor and giving lectures.

"May I be so bold as to assume it relates to the Caleston Rift," he said once he felt safe getting the words out without sounding winded.

The remote nebula was where they found themselves, stranded on the desolate moon of a gas giant that orbited seven hundred million kilometers from its parent star, fifteen light years away from the regional mass relay, deep in the Terminus. Far away from Thessia and from all of Citadel Space, the Caleston Rift had been where her investigation led her.

"It's the namesake, yes."

Eponymous Caleston had been a thriving colony before the Reaper invasion. It millions of inhabitants developed a strong economy and stable government – novelties in the Terminus Systems – trade relations with Council worlds, and in turn, provided resources and goods to marginally established colonies throughout the rest of Caleston Rift. Even pirate worlds, in their circuitous way, relied on Caleston. Gangs of outlaws snuck into its ports to barter for supplies that they had no means of producing themselves.

"After the Reapers ravaged Caleston, roles became reversed. It went from being the jewel of the Rift, to becoming dependent on remote settlements for necessities. Even second-rate ice drilling operations like the one here on Yagi are precious to Caleston right now."

"So you're concerned for the world of Caleston? Understandable. We learned on Maskawa to stop relying on supplies from there."

"No, it's not just here. Caleston was simply where the symptoms first became evident. It's no different on the major worlds in Council Space. Earth, Palaven, Sur'Kesh, all the home worlds were the great powers in the galaxy, had authority to impose decrees and treaties on far flung colonies in exchange for economic and industrial assistance. Pirate settlements were too small a threat to warrant the expense of purging distant trade lanes of them.

"In the wake of the Reaper War, everything's become reversed. The heavily populated planets were the most devastated. Those same home worlds now look to the smaller colonies that the Reaper ignored, and virtually plead for needed resources"

"And this relates to, what did you say: Caleston Wake?" The professor massaged the balls of his feet.

"It's a political term used in military intelligence to describe the dangers this situation presents. Remote colonies with unscrupulous leadership now wield enormous social leverage on an interplanetary scale." Falindra summarized diplomatically. She refrained from providing the asari perspective. The home worlds of all the other sapient species in the Council scrambled to win trade agreements with any peddler who surfaced with offers of iridium or platinum, and the governments didn't care to look closely at how those resources were gained – which slaves perished and which planets plundered. If someone had the supplies that were desperately needed for reconstruction, then the unspoken consensus was to ignore where those supplies came from, how they were acquired, and who grew rich from the sale. If the citizenry were assuaged, their deprivations slightly eased, the major governments asked no questions, relieved to stave off planet-wide panic and revolution.

The home worlds looked to the distant colonies of the Attican Traverse and Terminus and found themselves, for the first time, bargaining from a weak position.

It was the Serrice Guard's worst fear following the war: wealth going to the worst places. Every bandit kingdom fancied itself a government; every pirate a prime minister. The asari republics watched, abashed, as their allies' irresponsible political rulers gave fuel, fuse, and fire to the situation.

Falindra sympathized with their plight. If it took eighty years to rebuild the cities of Thessia, every asari looked forward to seeing most of the splendor of home eventually return. For the turians and humans and salarians, eighty years of reconstruction meant that the current generation's children would die before seeing a pre-Reaper semblance of their planets' glory.

It wasn't just the humans, turians, and salarians that caused concern. Dozens of sentient species pledged themselves to Citadel authority and protection. Most of them lacked either the infrastructure or inclination to have expanded across several worlds the way Council peoples had. The Serrice Guard had considered it part of their honor and duty to protect these weaker societies from larger powers ever since the asari became interstellar leaders. Those weaker peoples were the most desperate and the most vulnerable to predatory traffickers who emerged after the war.

When news of exploitation or mass slavery, environmental destruction, or illicit enterprise reached politicians on Council worlds they pretended it was fleeting, that the Terminus would return to being obscure and unimportant with the impending overthrow of a momentary crime lord. So long as needed imports continued arriving, it was easy to pretend.

The Serrice Guard did not have the luxury. Intelligence agencies were piecing together disturbing rumors and bits of evidence. Whoever hid helium-3 collectors above Kobayashi was interested in more than trade and charging high prices. Major political powers were attempting to birth themselves in the far flung reaches of the Terminus, growing rich off of the Council worlds that they might intend to supplant. Falindra had been following the trail of some of those rumors when Walbeck, her contact within Systems Alliance intelligence sold her out.

The dust of the Reaper War still hung in the air and someone knew already hoped to conquer the galaxy.

Gursk pretended to listen with the same sober attentiveness his friends shared, but in truth, the conversation had grew boring almost right after it started and his thoughts drifted. He admired the grey and yellow rocks and wondered which ones he might be able to break with a single punch. He hoped Falindra and Gursk finished discussing 'political terms' before the three of them died from radiation poisoning. If possible. Death by radiation or death by claws or bullets, it made little difference to him. Vorcha had no concept of dying peacefully in one's sleep. He gave mortality a stoic regard.

Falindra continued rambling some lecture that necessitated big words he cared nothing about. "The helium-3 mining operation here is too sophisticated for any bandit colony in the Terminus to establish without help from powerful supporters in Council Space. Facilities like this normally have investors, licenses, insurance… but this was done without any record. Someone is trying to stockpile vast quantities of resources with military applications, establish power without anyone seeing. I need to find out who that is, Drin."

Drin said nothing for the longest time. Perhaps because he felt catatonically bored like Gursk. No, he weighed her words, pondered their ramifications with the same analytical mind that manipulated plasma particles and predicted lightning strikes.

After he gave the information the respectful consideration it deserved, he dropped down from the rock onto his feet. "What must we do next?"

Gursk's ears perked up. Were they going to have a chance to do something? Something more exciting than standing around talking about machines and financial investors?

Falindra smiled at Drin. "Come on, Gursk," she beckoned. "Let's look at those shuttles."

"Finally. Me beginning to feel radiated."

They veered north around the habitat, seeking paths below the ridge line to avoid the remote chance of being seen. The habitat rested on a plateau surrounded by craters. Sections of the paths proved difficult to scale for Drin with his round body and stubby limbs. He floundered at a steep embankment and had to be propped upward by Falindra using her hands as stirrups. He apologized profusely. She waved the words away, glad, in the end, for his company.

They came around an escarpment where rocks became pebbles and dust and studied the shuttle pad ahead as it came back into view.

Vessels lay clustered on the small pad, more than Falindra anticipated. Quite a few more. Barely enough room remained for the two shuttles that Drau Bodix' raiding party took.

Ships from every origin rested on the pad: asari, human, salarian, turian, batarian. The motley collection of vessels proved the krogan, without shipyards of their own, scavenged and stole from a range of victims whenever the opportunity became available. Some of them were property of the fringe merchants who dwelled among the krogan and slaves, but most were Dread Claw property.

The largest by far was an old model turian _Champion_ class corvette, obsolete and outgunned even if in perfect operating condition. The damaged wing assembly suggested differently. It still made an imposing pirate flagship. Its oversized gun emplacements no doubt instilled suitable amounts of terror in the personnel aboard civilian transports and cargo ships they were usually targeted.

Falindra walked across the pad, examining each vessel in turn. Gursk and Drin flanked her, the latter turning every few seconds to face the habitat's northern wall. They were in clear view now of several windows and uncomfortably close. He imagined the airlock opening at any moment, krogan bursting forth, charging feral monsters in full blood rage. Actually, he only had direct sight of the building's windows for a few seconds before shuttles stood as cover, but somehow those shuttles, gargantuan in comparison to his small size, still did not feel big enough to hide him from view. Fear turned the shuttles into one-way mirrors. He might not see the building, but an army of guards saw him clearly, mocking his delusion of stealth and waiting to surprise him.

"We should hurry," he said. "So we have time to return before you suffer radiation exposure." While he genuinely worried for Falindra's health, he was shamed that it was only one reason he wanted to return inside Building B.

"Do not worry, professor. I won't need long."

A human-made freighter, _Opportunity_ class, rickety and with a damaged external sensor display, stood near her. Beside it was a turian armored shuttle, an efficient, short range model. It couldn't operate beyond a single solar system without a parent vessel, but had been enhanced with extra armor. Bodix likely used similar shuttles for his raids across the planet. This one, judging by a quick survey of the thrusters, was inoperable pending serious repairs.

That meant the Dread Claw only had two functioning planetary shuttles, useful information. She'd already seen to one of them.

The ship that drew her attention most was the Salarian _Dark Hammer_ model. It was misshapen and unimpressive to a casual observer, cluttered with electronic modules atop the bloated fuselage. Falindra knew better. Nominally, a long range survey shuttle, the Asari Navy despised the vessels. The _Dark Hammer_ appeared harmless on summary inspection, and specialized titanium-iridium alloys made it notoriously difficult for scans to penetrate the hulls. Every panel and rivet on the ship was high tech. A _Dark Hammer_ was incredibly modular, suspiciously well-suited for conversion into reconnaissance, and espionage vessels. The Nefrane once captured privateers in one. It led the cruiser on a formidable chase before raw firepower finally brought it to a halt. When the Nefrane's marines looked inside they found it was modified – no surprise – fitted with computers that boasted twelve times the processing power available on some destroyers. All that for a civilian survey ship. None of the marines believed that the antagonistic crew were mere privateers, not in that ship. It was a favorite of the salarian Special Tasks Groups.

Falindra planned to watch the salarians back inside more closely. The krogan may have captured it, but if any of the salarian merchants were owners, then they had a past worth inquiring about. Independent captains who chose _Dark Hammers_ for their vessels knew their business and that business usually called for felony charges.

In either case, as much as she might like to spirit away with it, the sophisticated systems came with trade-offs. The advanced, compact systems were delicate, demanded constant maintenance and were prone to malfunction without the constant care of expert technicians. Plus, it was too small for her travel plans if she intended on absconding twenty slaves from the Dread Claw.

Next to it stood an entirely different sort of metallic beast. Actually, it seemed to slouch more than stand, if such an impression was possible for spaceships to give. The scuffed registry markings under its nose identified it as a batarian _Bane Bringer_ , an older cutter. The catamaran design looked bulky but powerful thrusters made it as effective in atmosphere as in space. And it was a workhorse. If an enemy blasted away everything but the cockpit and the engine, it would still manage to limp towards the nearest repair bay. It was a nimble and durable, if obsolete.

"May I borrow your omni-tool again, professor."

He'd fallen behind several paces, constantly stealing glances in the habitat's direction. Upon her request he did what she assumed to be his version of a crouch and stealthy approach. She tried suppressing the smirk on her face and failed.

"We'll make a commando of you in no time," she said.

"Shut up." He once more handed her the requested instrument. "What if someone sees us? You have a plan for that, right?"

"Knew me should have brought Roumba." Gursk stayed close to Drin's side.

"We're not going to be seen, not out here anyway. Unless the krogan are struck by a sudden fondness for gazing at the horizon." Falindra paused for a moment, surprised by the quip that came from her mouth. It was unlike her to banter with strangers, even acquaintances.

She dismissed the novelty and pulled a small device from her pocket.

"What is that?"

"Hastings' remote systems interface," she said absently, concentrating on using it in conjunction with the omni-tool.

"I knew you provoked that brawl with him for a reason when you first arrived," said Drin.

Gursk curled his upper lip and harrumphed. "Hastings. Ain't punching his face good enough reason by itself?"

Falindra found it hard to disagree.

The _Bane Bringer_ 's entrance ramp hissed open. Falindra stepped inside. The other two watched as she tinkered with a control panel and then headed into the cockpit. She returned several minutes later.

She muttered names of components and tools under her breath. "Half the systems are scavenged. I don't think the Dread Claw have had it long. It still has Batarian Fleet records from the Reaper War. Bodix must have scavenged it as a derelict, half the equipment inside is human make. It'll do nicely, though."

"Nicely for what," asked Drin.

She arched her eyebrow. "For liberating the slaves. Say one thing for batarian slavers, they know how to build environmental systems that accommodate many species."

She closed the entrance. If she had wasted her tracking device on Drau Mar's omni-tool, and she still lacked one of her own, then she at least counted this development as good fortune. She'd been prepared for the possibility that Hastings' ship would not suit her needs. The remote systems access she stole from him barely adapted to the new ship, but she managed to make the modifications somehow.

It was important to be grateful for a small convenience because without her bio-amp, without even a firearm to draw, the one thing she knew wouldn't be easy was the fight ahead.

They retreated back behind the ridgeline and took a more direct path back to the entrance than the one they came out from. On their way Falindra examined the hatch extending from the hazmat room. The krogan had sealed it, but Drin's cutting torch might change that in an hour.

They passed an open-faced garage that stood near the shuttle pad. Two enclosed ATVs rested inside, standard issue that came with the facility's original setup.

Falindra gauged their holding capacity.

Then her thoughts returned to the _Bane Bringer_. Most critical systems read as serviceable according to the cockpit computer. Only the hydraulics in the starboard wing needed repair. If she stole parts from other ships she might have it fixed within three hours. That meant at least two more journeys out here undetected.

Gursk sang off key during the walk back. The lyrics escaped his memory, but 'la lala la do-a la' served in their stead happily enough. The others considered it a blessing that he sang quietly.

When they returned to Building B he approached the outer hatch and grasped the lever with both hands, grunted and pulled, until the hatch opened. He repeated the process at the inner hatch and the three travelers made their way through tunnel. This time Gursk measured his preference for radiation versus the puddle. Radiation won out; he nearly retreated, but Mechano-Man goaded him onward.

Drin knew their journey would end badly. The moment they crossed the shuttle pad the anxiety produced "blockages in his spleen" as the volus liked to say. Fear was in his veins. He visualized too many scenarios of the krogan discovering them, had been plagued with premonition.

The obese Drau Gorba stood in front of the first row of generators. He squinted. A strand of saliva escaped his lower jaw and fell onto the serrated blade he held. The barbed whip he employed while serving as the processing room's overseer was clasped in his other hand.

"You've grown too fond of using your legs," he directed at Falindra. His voice was guttural and playful in its menace. "Don't think they're needed on ice duty. Time to get rid of them."

Khaki-skinned Kryts appeared from behind a generator, claws outstretched and sadism in his eyes.

"Kryts," said Gorba. "Let's free our slaves of unnecessary limbs." His subordinate cooed in response.


	7. Chapter 7

Some people called Baleron Kye foppish. The salarian wore a burgundy suit with matching red boots. Even his gloves were burgundy. Only the jewelry, a collection of silver and diamond chains hanging from his neck, stood out from the red.

He liked the color. It brought out the green in his skin. It might be an unnecessary vanity for a man in his profession to care about the quality of his wardrobe, but it was the attention to detail that was critical in life's practices, marked the difference between professionals and fools. To grow lax with mundane tasks bred sloppiness when performing crucial ones.

A few days back, while he was completing an errand on the planet Trident, out in the Hekate System, a human laughed at him for wearing the bright-colored outfit. That man had called him a disco pimp. Baleron had no idea what it meant, did not realize it was an intended insult until the man tried to mug Baleron. That man mistook Baleron for a victim. That man's next of kin were informed by hospital staff of his death from massive coronary arrest two hours later. The news doubtlessly came as a relief to the family, being rid of such an imbecile blood relation.

Baleron stretched back in his chair, resting in the cockpit, pleased to be leaving for his next operation. He had just finished retrofitting his _Dark Hammer_ for the upcoming clandestine mission. False registry signals lay embedded in the IFF. Palladium alloy reinforced the hull. He also inspected his personal suit of Colossus body armor. It was in perfect condition and the color matched his suit. Now he just needed to be rid of the captives in his makeshift brig.

The Hades Nexus had been a terrible ordeal on the whole. Every salacious rumor, every gruesome holo-vid or speculative news source that Council Space received about the Terminus Systems was a modest truth for what he discovered on some of the worlds in that ungodly collection of systems.

A few colonies were legitimately run, safe in their own way. Most exploratory landings on uncharted settlements brought you to unregistered mining operations if you were lucky. If luck decided you were hardly worth its companionship, which it invariably did in the Terminus, you found yourself in a pirate haven instead, volunteering for slavery.

He acquitted himself well during his visit, completed his operations on schedule. The one refreshing element about the armpit of the galaxy was that he was free to solve problems, usually people, with bullets. In Council Space subtlety proved the virtue of professionals and Baleron, consummate professional, knew when to stay his hand unless advantage and need demanded action. Sometimes, though, he encountered people desperately in need of being shot. In Council Space had to walk away from such encounters. Not in the Terminus.

The vast majority of people he met bothered him. The Terminus was rife with degenerates. It seemed implausible that their ancestors managed to crawl from the muck, never mind travel across the stars. It was a testament to his mental fortitude that he refrained from hurting people more often.

He was by no means a wanton murderer and he managed to stay his hand, keep weapons holstered, and feign meekness in the face of insults. The universe eagerly gave birth to a teeming swath of idiots for whom a bullet in the head might improve brain function. Actually killing every one of them implied the extinction of a few species. So even in the Terminus he restrained himself most of the time. It felt refreshing, however, to reverse the fortunes of at least a few aspiring cutthroats on occasion.

The _Dark Hammer_ 's indicator light blinked that he had approached the vicinity of a comm buoy. He reversed thrusters until the ship lost momentum and opened channels.

Within moments the face of a dark skinned human woman appeared on his monitor screen. Shyamala Sura possessed a bulldog face, sagged and wrinkled. It contrasted the fierce intelligence that shone in her hazel eyes, the dignity of perfect posture.

"Ms. Sura, I've finished in the Hades Nexus. Walbeck was correct. An asari commando infiltrated our operations on Trident."

Sura kept perfect composure. If the news frightened or enraged, or made her want to dance with joy for that matter, she showed no sign, maintaining the honed façade of stately corporatism.

"The situation?" she asked succinctly.

"It's secure. I eliminated her before she accessed a communications V.I. to report her findings."

"Walbeck led us to another one," she said. "We have her detained in the Caleston Rift with our krogan contracts."

'Contracts' she called them. If he was inclined to smirk he'd be showing one at the notion of a krogan pirate signing employment forms.

Shyamala Sura had proven her genius for administration, for a host of illicit activities committed on spreadsheets. She embodied the frightening accomplishments that unbridled ambition yields. During the course of their partnership he learned that her flare for head-office strategy and politicking did not translate into wisdom for field operations.

"Please permit me to express once more, Ms. Sura the risks involved with such a prisoner. Killing a member of the Serrice Guard is a dreadful enough undertaking – I plan on keeping souvenirs. Hoping to keep one imprisoned is reckless."

"I appreciate your candor, Baleron, but we've decided the risks are acceptable. She'll be in your capable hands soon."

He kept silent about his discomfiture with the prospect. He spent three days and fifty thousand credits arranging to ambush the Serrice Commando on Trident and it still took every advantage of his tactical cloak to come out the survivor.

"First, I need you to pick up our newest field agent," she continued.

Baleron Kye clenched his fists under the console panel, away from her view. Delays and deviations. If the humans planned on sending their own operatives then they ought to issue proper training first. He refused to hide his concerns.

"I'll not put my missions in jeopardy for the sake of coddling rookies." Too much was at stake for sycophancy. Shyamala Sura requested his services from the Baleron Dalatross after hearing about his impressive record. To his reckoning, part of that request included receiving his candid advice. She was free to ignore those recommendations, and often did, but he refused to let an operation fail because of silent obedience.

"The last thing I'd allow is risk to your work," she said. "The woman I'm sending you is no amateur. You may find her helpful. We've just equipped her with an advanced Savant IX biotic implant we acquired."

"A biotic." Baleron considered it and decided that such assistance had advantages. If he planned on facing another asari commando, it helped to have an adjutant with the ability to unleash a singularity on his behalf. So long as this woman remembered that she was an adjutant. He scanned the coordinates Sura sent for the acquisition and gave her a respectful nod. "I'll rendezvous with your new agent on my way to Kobayashi."

"Good. And then hurry." Sura brushed aside the ornamental, crystal mug of tea that sat on her desk beside a VI projector and leaned forward until her face overwhelmed Baleron's monitor. The crevices and wrinkles magnified a dour face that a calculating, determined mind. The face of someone who'd never swayed from making decisions that made most people blanch. "We need you back in Hades Nexus."

Baleron summoned all his will to avoid an outburst of irritation. He was a professional. More than that, any poor choice of etiquette on his part might reflect poorly on his dalatross. "Why?"

"The Wraith has returned."

"You told me that the Wraith was an asari commando. I eliminated the two asari commandoes causing you trouble there. You said the intelligence was good. That was supposed to mean no more Wraith."

"Clearly someone else carries the identity." Sura approached the topic diplomatically, as through grateful for Baleron's aid, sympathetic that his business in the far reaches of the Terminus was unfinished. They both knew such courtesies were a front. "She or he somehow relocated from Asteria to Trident. That's why they seemed to disappear around the same time you dealt with the commandos."

"Are you sure it's the same individual?" asked Baleron. His faith in her corporation's intelligence apparatus rapidly diminished with each series of troubleshooting missions they assigned him.

"Same weapons, same methods of evading our security. The damage on Trident is already considerable. We can't afford for our operations on that planet to fall behind. Deal with it. I don't care about the collateral damage."

It was the world he wanted to visit least, a lawless world of constantly warring pirate gangs. The only thing more dangerous was the oversized fauna. It was a refuse of the degenerate and depraved. And secret investors had determined it to be the most important planet in the galaxy.

"Very well. I'll prepare my aquatic gear." Trident was a water world.

"First deal with that asari commando the Dread Claw is holding for us." Sura clicked off their connection.

Sye Videl stood in hiding, leaning against the side of a reserve generator, and watched the confrontation unfold.

The power generator he used for cover lay covered in fecal matter from pests that nested under the warmth of its ventilation fan. No matter how far he travelled across the galaxy, no matter the disasters he dodged or escapades he undertook, he always found himself standing next to a pile of shit.

He watched Falindra since the break of morning. When other slaves gathered to speculate about Bodix's departure she sprang off instead, running as though she'd fallen behind on crusade. He pried himself away from the humans and salarians while they chattered away. Excited salarians made for frightfully fast and persistent talkers; he wished them success in their speculations. He trailed Falindra to the volus scientist's lair and was amazed when they partnered with one of the vorcha. They wound their way through the sublevel, sneaking into areas he'd never before seen. He knew how to move quietly, how to avoid being seen. Years of evading debt collectors and law enforcement officers provided him with a knack for stealth the envy of spies and assassins.

He began to think that Falindra fell into one of those categories: spies or assassins. Beating Ralik and Bols into unconsciousness with a flurry of martial arts maneuvers, saving him in the process, certainly implied a past career outside customer service or administration. More than that, it was the way she looked around herself all the time.

He watched her while the slaves worked, while they ate, stung that she never looked back, except to provide the most cursory, dismissive glance, as if the confirm that he was not a threat and, therefore, not worth consideration. That's how she looked at everyone and everything around her. She sized them up, assessed the threat. Other slaves did the same, but always with the look of frightened prey. Not her. She analyzed.

She surveyed around, looked back at the trail behind them repeatedly along their way towards the outer hatch. He lost sight of them more than once to escape detection. She worried about being caught by rampaging krogan rather than sneaky drell, the only reason he managed the pursuit.

Falindra and her cohorts disappeared from view for the duration they were outside, but Sye trusted they planned to return from the same hatch they departed from, and so he waited near the power generators and saw Drau Gorba and Kryts arrive. Then he saw the quarian, Trez'Kailer arrive. He hid behind another generator further back in the room. Why he'd also arrived, Sye could only speculate.

Drau Gorba confronted Falindra when she entered the room. His incredible girth utterly dwarfed her slim body. He loomed over her, treaded close to provide her a full appreciation of the contrast between their physiques. She looked delicate, even fragile in comparison. Sye had learned that such fragility was drastically misleading. Maybe a lesson not as thoroughly enlightening as the one the batarians reaped, but he learned it. Unfortunately, Sye doubted her hidden strengths had a chance of overcoming Gorba's barbed, plated armor. The krogan angled the serrated chain blade near her chin.

The snivelling Kryts paced several steps sideways, ready to lash out against the volus' flank. In response, Gursk positioned himself between the two. The vorcha hissed and bared teeth at each other.

"Let's show a little restraint everyone," Drin pleaded. His voice sounded small, forgettable; it lacked the confidence his students once knew.

Gorba's hands twitch with restrained frenzy. He was beyond the stage of making threats. His intentions were not to chastise or abuse. He wanted to see blood splash across the ground. Knots twisted in Sye's stomach. Instinct sensed the difference between two people posturing, braced for a fist fight, versus lethal confrontations. It made him aware of his own mortality. Fear can make sentient people as aware of danger as any animal. No amount of civilization, of spacefaring technology, can weed those instincts out of the bones. They may become dulled during stretches of comfort, but being witness to a krogan on the verge of Blood Rage sharpened them again with remarkable speed. Gorba wanted carnage and Falindra refused to cow under the overseer's baleful gaze.

Sye despised violence, not least because he was so utterly bad at it. After so many years of being on the receiving end of fists, feet, and clubs, he felt due to be skilled in his own right at the sport by now. It never worked that way.

He wished his hiding spot possessed an extra layer of shadow. The nausea grew. He lost sight of Trez'Kailer and felt a stab of jealousy at the quarian's superior hiding position.

Knowing the danger he risked by revealing himself, numb and dry-mouthed with fear, he pondered the motivation behind the uniquely stupid action he made next. He was prone to acting without thought. It had led him into a hundred of what could euphemistically be called 'adventures'. They made for great tales, but great tales are usually unhappy moments to actually live through. This was one of his stupidest actions in a long time. If he survived, maybe he'd call it an adventure. He knew of only one explanation.

He stood, back straight, shook his sleeves so they hung comfortably loose around his wrists, gave his limbs and neck a decent stretch, and strutted into the centre of the room, trying to summon the charm that had won him entry into imperial palaces, government dinners, and rich women's beds. Maybe not the exact same charm. Gorba was by no estimation presidential or womanly.

"Gorba," he bellowed with the gusto of having caught sight of a long missed friend. "You big, nasty toad." He smiled. Jibes between pals. "Damn, you look brutal holding that sword. If I had a rocket launcher I'd still think twice before crossing you. Everything going all right down here?"

The krogan repositioned to catch sight of the new arrival while still keeping one eye focused on the asari. His expression of surprise was matched by every other face in the room. Sye denied Gorba time to respond.

"Drin, is everything fixed with the outer hatch," he continued. "It's been almost an hour."

Falindra's body tensed while Drin became jittery. Syllables tumbled out of Drin's mouth but terror turned his response to gibberish.

"Gorba, if you came to inspect their progress, I have been watching them."

"What is your fool mouth yapping on about, drell," Gorba shouted over his shoulder, his attention focused again on the victims he planned to make.

Kryts, hunkered and ready to spring into Gursk's midsection moments earlier, stepped back, confused. He waved one claw towards Sye. "Me no like drell. He says things to confuse."

"I ordered them here to complete repairs on the outer hatch. One of the sealants was damaged." Sye affected a pretense of casual ease mixed with mild irritation that an explanation was necessary and then received with such skepticism.

"Door never broken before. Me think door fine," hissed Kryts.

"Think?" Sye sounded impressed. "Now don't go diverting brainpower from breathing and heart rate, Kryts. You know you've never been good at multitasking."

Kryts recoiled, legs ready to spring as if he might cover the entire distance between him and Sye in a single leap. His claw curled at the air, ready to eviscerate.

"Both of you keep silent," Drau Gorba boomed, the unexpected course that unfolded befuddled him, waylaid the brimming blood rage. He moved again, stepping back to have a view of everybody else in the room that made their presence known. Then he directed the sword toward Sye Videl.

Sye, in his cockiness, either wandered too closely or underestimated Gorba's reach. The chain blade sword seemed to magically grow in size. He crossed his eyes staring down the point as it hovered near his nose. Gorba offered a sharks' smile. Stained, flesh-rending teeth lined his maw. Milky ooze seeped from infected wounds along his gums, mixing with the foamed saliva.

Sye shuddered. Only one explanation possibly existed for his degree of stupidity.

Falindra's tactical insights shone best in her response to the unknown. Her intuition and perception, her training, they all worked to inform her on whether to be cautious or daring. When to stay her hand and when to commit to a full assault. She honed those qualities for six years as the Chief Weapons Officer on the Nefrane's night watch, expanded on them during her three years as a marine squad leader. They earned her a placement in Serrice Guard.

It was this intuition that advised caution while she gathered data during her captivity. Caution that compelled her decision to exclude Sye from the circle of individuals she risked showing trust. He wasn't a slave, not even a stranded merchant. Residing with the krogan had been done by choice. The risk that he might betray her to the Dread Claw was significant. The slightest sympathy for his hosts, or deluded belief that his safety was still best preserved under their rule and he'd have motive for betraying her secrets. She saw no logical reason he might gamble away his false safety by assisting with her schemes.

Falindra was wrong.

Two flaws existed with Falindra's tactical reasoning.

First, Sye Videl, no matter what job or vocation or scheme or calling he pretended to embody, was above all a consummate gambler. He never made the prudent choice because such a choice yielded no reward, no story to tell. If he had the good sense to avoid needless risks, he never would have been forced to seek refuge with a band of krogan pirates.

Second, and the more important reason why Sye chose the stupid course of action, the chief reason why he invariably found himself making this stupid choice in particular, was that he was completely, inconsolably, embarrassingly smitten.

It started shortly after her arrival at the habitat, a curiosity about the slight asari newcomer who was quiet and kept to herself except to ask the occasional question about oddly technical subjects. She asked about shuttles and supply runs and structural weaknesses. Oh, and she summarily mauled Hastings and all four of his crew in a brief, decisive brawl, that left several slaves silently applauding. Hastings had enjoyed bullying the slaves, asserting his marginally higher place in the Dread Claw hierarchy. After two black eyes, three bruised ribs, and a lacerated wrist, he saw the wisdom in leaving the slaves in peace.

Curiosity was fine. Sye had always been inquisitive, enjoyed learning about new people. He thrived when the opportunity came to visit new worlds, immerse himself in the odd customs of a new people, revel in the pageantry of alien festivals. The other two asari whispered wild speculations about their new kin who joined the slaves' ranks, used words like 'elite' and 'commando', within hearing distance of Sye (more precisely, from where he eavesdropped), almost blatant in their attempts to pique his interest, whether or not they knew of his presence.

Curiosity germinated into infatuation, which grew until too many of his thoughts became preoccupied with her.

He'd never been an early riser. It was the sign of a prudish lifestyle. He woke up an hour early each morning once he discovered that he could watch her exercise. He was embarrassed to admit, even to himself, that he adopted the practices of a hormonal youth governed by urges more than brains. He'd become a pervert who pried into her private moments, horrified that he might be caught, and despairing because she never noticed.

No matter how often he chastised himself, he stole glances of her every morning while she performed stretches, or ran laps through the tunnels, or did pull-ups on an outstretched rebar. He became lost in the admiration of Falindra's form: her slender neck and arms and long fingers; her deep blue skin and the violet spots that trailed from her forehead down her neck and below her clavicle. The spots continued under her shirt along locations he longed to explore with his tongue and lips. The perfect symmetry of her body was laid bare during a pull-up. Her legs stretched, toes pointed downward.

He fantasized having those legs wrapped around his torso. It caused him restless nights, stirring under a rotted blanket.

She was glorious. Sapphire made flesh.

There were advantages to pursuing an asari. Chief of these was they had no fathers, a definite favor from the cosmos. Sye courted women from across the known stars, from the Armstrong Nebula to the Ismar Frontier. In far too many instances the romances ended abruptly after an irritable father drove him off ('irritable' being a euphemism for placing a bounty on the head of the rascally drell who seduced the virtue from honorable daughters). So pursuing a woman who had no father was marginally safer.

He also enjoyed the idea of courting a woman who had the skills to double as his bodyguard. That made her more exciting.

There were so many reasons why she made him stupid.

Sye stared at the chain blade in Gorba's hand, its tip inches from his nose. The obese krogan defied the drell to continue talking. His free hand thumbed open a hip holster and withdrew a pistol, aimed it toward Falindra. At this short a range, even with his attention diverted, Gorba was unlikely to miss.

Kryts' tongue flashed like a snake. He squared off against his Gursk, eager for the promised fight and to prove that his strength was sufficient to maim his kin without the usual aid of other vorcha at his side. The two hissed back and forth, bearing fangs. Kryts maneuvered for position, footsteps slow, measured, stalking. Muscles twitched with built up adrenaline. Gursk adjusted his position, braced against the pending pounce, and kept Drin shielded with his body against attack.

The fear evaporated. Sye felt it disappear as though a ghost that shared his skin had been banished by sudden exorcism. He was a gambler. Drau Gorba simply made the game high-stakes. He bluffed, made an irritated scowl, and casually wrapped his fingers around the blade that threatened his face.

"What are you fuming about? I told Drin to come here. That hatch," Sye pointed for dramatic effect, "was damaged. Letting in atmosphere or leaking out air – I don't know the physics, but it seemed like one of those small, pesky things that becomes one of those enormous, pain-in-my-crotch things if nobody bothers with – what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah: repairs."

Gorba curled his lip. His hand squeezed the sword hilt until it paled from lack of blood circulation. "You told the slaves to come here?"

"Of course. I'm no slave, if you need reminding. The volus detected problems from the environmental control room. I explored here, confirmed that disaster was on its way and might be pleasant to avoid. I sent him to repair the hatch and he needed an assistant." Sye nodded in Falindra's direction. He then wriggled his fingers. "Human architecture: not made for stubby volus hands, you know."

Wrath that had threatened taking hold of the krogan began to ebb. He fastened the chain blade onto its belt clasp, allowed Sye to relax. Kryts stared, confused.

Gorba suddenly reached out and grabbed Sye by the throat. His fingers applied enough pressure to cause pain, to demonstrate how easily he might snap the neck with a little extra force easily within his power to apply.

"You should have notified the Dread Claw. Wouldn't you agree that we want to know about problems with our building? Otherwise we might think the slaves plotting something unkindly."

Awkward sounds sputtered from his mouth before Sye finally managed, "I did. I told him."

Gorba turned and shot a glare toward the individual Sye indicated. He let Sye go, shoving him backward in the process, and stalked toward the lackey who dared show unsanctioned initiative.

"This true," asked Gorba. You led them down here?"

"Yes?" said Gursk, sensing the rouse he needed to corroborate, uncertain about the right words to say.

The fist struck with blurring motion. Gorba extended his arm, pushing the weight of his whole body behind it. Gursk's head snapped sideways and he stumbled back, reeling from the surprise as much as the pain. It turned out that all that krogan rage, once aroused, needs to find release somewhere.

Gursk cried out. The shrill, bestial sound incensed Gorba and he struck a second, crushing blow against the vorcha's midsection.

Kryts gleefully joined the assault. He'd been disappointed when it looked like they might depart the room without asserting physical dominance and he relished the reawakened opportunity like a child given the prized toy to try. Claws swept down in long, reaping strikes. Sprays of blood cast dark streams against the metal floor.

"Next time," barked Gorba, "tell a krogan. You don't make decisions."

Falindra stood and watched. Frustration and anger simmered, became an illness. Drin looked to her, expecting intervention, rescue for the person who helped them, had been the guide she needed. She did nothing.

She hoped he understood, or might later. She hated watching the blood sport, fought the near overwhelming urge to intervene and loathed herself for it. She wanted to ward off the blows being hammered down on Gursk's body, even absorb a few if it spared him some small portion of the savagery. She wanted to tell Drin as much, defend herself against his expectant gaze, but she refrained from speaking or acting. The subterfuge was spoiled the moment she showed sympathy or allegiance toward Gursk in any way. Drau Gorga would know for certain that three wanderers had conspired together. Slaves do not pity overseers. He wouldn't know the details or if they found success in the schemes they shared, but that wouldn't matter. The slightest indication that his suspicions were correct would invalidate Sye's lucky ruse and justify the killing of all three, maybe Sye as well.

Gorba landed another fist into the abdomen with a sickening sound that both squished and crunched echoes of the damage inflicted. Kryts indulged in his proper share of the entertainment, pinned an arm under his right foot, and with his left foot stomped down hard, fracturing the wrist until the broken extremity hung in misshapen angles.

Agony and idiotic stubbornness gave Gursk reservoirs of grit. From his prone position, his upper body vaulted forward and he head butted Kryts in the belly, knocking the wind from his assailant. The futile effort to fight back earned him a knee from Gorba against his lower jaw that sent a tooth skittering across the floor.

Falindra stood and watched, bit her own lip until a droplet of blood formed a tear on her chin. She silently thanked Gursk, who screamed and writhed in pain and tried to fight back, but never deflected blame.

Unable to watch any longer, Sye finally reached up and grabbed Gorba by the shoulder.

"Stop already. I can't decide if you're doing a shitty job of killing him or a shittier job of proving your friendship. You keep hitting him in the head and he won't have a brain left to remember the lesson."

Gorba backhanded Sye in the face for daring to interrupt. The drell fell hard against the floor, cracking his head against metal tiles. Red and green stars colored his vision.

The interruption served its purpose. After proving his physical dominance against two hapless underdogs, Gorba's fury was spent. He massaged his fists, glanced with the satisfaction at the damage he inflicted, and said: "Remember next time. Stupid mongrel."

Head painted with dark blood from the multitude of oozing wounds across his scalp, Gursk managed to prop himself at an angle from the floor with one elbow. "Two plus three equals seven." The words gurgled out.

Gorba sneered at him and turned away, motioning for Kryts to follow toward the door. After two paces he stopped, stared thoughtfully at nothing and said to Sye, "Aren't you glad you're under our protection?"

"Very," he responded from the ground.

Gorba and Kryts, triumph in their steps, left.

Two hours earlier Falindra told herself that Drin Haylar was the most important person in the habitat. Responsibility demanded that, faced with the dreadful dilemma, she must guarantee his survival, even at the expense of innocent lives. She doubted if the harsh discipline existed inside her to make those sorts of sacrifices that the Serrice Republic required be in her mental arsenal. She had been prepared to kill Gursk during their journey outside the habitat at the slightest indication of a double-cross. Now she vowed to help Gursk gain vengeance, if only to extinguish her own shame at having stood by. She'd not be able to stand by again.


	8. Chapter 8

Falindra remembered events on the work floor the next day far differently from everyone else who witnessed what happened.

She sat at the operating console for the ice drill where it loomed over the conveyor belts below. Ten slaves and two members of Hastings's former crew inspected broken chunks of ice riding the belt. Drau Zugo and one of the vorcha, Milch, paced back and forth along the line of workers, guaranteeing the steady pace of labor with shouts and surly faces. Milch did most of the screaming. Zugo was content to pace back and forth, make his presence felt, otherwise distracted by the vids played through his omni-tool.

The same operation ran ten meters to the side along the line that began with Bols' ice drill. The batarian wiped sleep from his four eyes.

Maybe the lack of sleep had been a factor. Staying awake late into the night, to give scrawny salarians a few bruises might be passing entertainment for an evening, but it kept one from being refreshed and ready for work the next day.

Most likely Bols would have been helpless to change anything no matter his condition. The equipment was old. Worn down.

Ice is first pulled into the work floor through enormous hollow worms of flexible steel polymer that have multiple air hatches because the far ends extend hundreds of meters into the air. Serpentine towers gaping toward Yagi's thin, upper atmosphere. Automated drones retrieve gargantuan rocks of ice from Kobayashi's outer rings and deposit them into the tube-towers where they are whipped down in a cyclone of artificial air currents before dropping into a funnel of transparent alumina where an ice drill cracks them into even smaller pieces that are manageable for humanoid hands.

The alumina funnels are incredibly resilient. The corroded latches that kept them closed during operation had seen better times.

Beneath the din of cracking ice and grunting slaves no one heard the first latch break and Bols, yawning, missed any sign of the remaining two buckling under the strain. Ice and stones ricocheted against the funnel's interior at tornado speeds until the last two latches surrendered. The top half of the funnel burst open and before the workers had time to react, lethal shrapnel of ice and stone sprayed the room.

Falindra's mind reacted immediately to the flashes of information throughout the room.

A vorcha and salarian suffered the poor misfortune of standing within the trajectory of the worst part of the blast. The vorcha was cleanly decapitated so quickly that the body remained standing for several moments as though confused by the predicament. Rock catapulted the salarian thirty feet, crushing his ribcage against the wall.

Ice shards perforated Kilne's volus pressure suit. His skin made a popping sound as he exploded inside the damaged shell. The human Richard, who stood next to Kilne, may not have required a pressure suit to survive off Earth, but he fared no better when the same number of shards blasted into him.

In a surge of mad adrenaline, Ralik tipped a large section of the second conveyor belt over. He grabbed the one person next to him, Vallon Corla, by the shoulder and pulled him behind cover. Muriel and Elayda scrambled to join them. Hastings used the dead volus as a shield. Most people fell mindlessly to the ground, uselessly covering heads with hands. Santina sprung under the first conveyor belt panicked, and caught her sleeve against one of the spokes, which now eagerly hoped to avenge itself against her fearlessness, grinding and pulling her arm closer, hungry to chew her arm into unrecognizable gore.

Only the male quarian, Trez'Kailer, had the presence of mind to make his way toward the power box to shut the whole system down. He moved haphazardly, darting between pieces of cover, trying to reach the steel box that housed the master power switch, but he became pinned down behind a support column that offered the last defense against flying ice between his position and the ten meter run he still needed to make.

That's what Falindra observed, assessed, and reacted to: snap images of the killed, the injured, and the calamity. The power box was no more reachable for her than it was for the quarian; it was too far across the room. She remembered instead jumping onto a perch of the wall, then again onto the roof of Bols' cockpit. She climbed the head of the steel worm and pulled the lever that closed the inner air latch.

Ice that had already passed into the open funnel still bounced around and shot into the room. Nobody was safe yet. Sparks shot out of the power cable supporting the first conveyor belt and an orange flame rippled into existence. Falindra dove to the ground and grabbed Charval Potes. He hid from the explosions of ice and after that adrenaline had shut him down. That was the danger of adrenaline. People untrained to handle it were more likely to become paralyzed by the shock than they were to display great feats of strength. He was oblivious to the electric fire inches away. Falindra pulled him to cover. Then she sprang past Drau Zugo (but not before snatching a cable from his omni-tool) toward a human, Louis Salmond, who squatted on the ground and had miraculously not been shot apart by the ice; she pulled him under the first conveyor belt where others hid.

Next Falindra made her way toward Santina. The girl squirmed against the spoke, her whole body turning and contorting as her arm twisted with the wheel's rotation. In her panic she tried pulling her arm away and kept pulling frantically. The spoke held her sleeve fast and refused to give it up. Falindra immediately saw the issue and the escape. She clasped onto Santina's arm and pushed instead. The girl was too terrified to understand or to fight against Falindra. She was an outside observer, watching as someone nudged her fingers toward the spoke's teeth. But Falindra only moved it close enough to give the sleeve the slack needed to manipulate its release.

Another explosion of ice flew toward the two of them. Falindra raised her arm. Instinct and fear gave her a flash of power she never otherwise possessed – and no other species would find remotely possible without a bio-amp. The blue energy of her biotic barrier surged into existence along her side. The force of the ice still knocked her to the ground. Pain bloomed across her upper arm. But both she and Santina were still alive when they should have been riddled with deadly bullets of ice.

That's what Falindra remembered. There had been an accident. She assessed what was happening, and did what she was able to do. She ran and jumped toward a few places, pushed a few people around, and then it was over. As the last of the ice escaped the funnel, Trez'Kailer final turned off power to the drills.

What everyone else remembered was far different. The salarian, Charval Potes, found he was unable to recall the entire incident until hours later. Then the events, like pieces of a time puzzle fell into place with vivid horror and he remembered far more than he ever wanted. It began with an explosion of noise. He had no idea what to make of the cacophony and chaos. People screamed or looked confused and some part of his mind registered that they were mirrors of his own reaction. He stood frozen, watching his former captain, Murso Tesk, get hurled into the wall. Embedded in it more precisely. Dead before he knew what happened and Charval, numb, assumed another rock of ice would claim him next and he wondered whether he should cry or if he cared at all. The quandary unleashed a wave of shames he'd carried for several years and he thought he deserved no better than to die while stranded on some shitty moon.

No sooner had Charval resigned himself to an ignominious 'death by splattering' that he saw the asari move from atop the ice drill. Movement was an unjust word. Other people were moving: they crawled behind cover and trembled with fear and collapsed from injury. The asari leaped with fearless grace, weaving her way through a meteor shower of ice, heedless of the industrial drills beneath her, ready to rend her body apart. She mocked the angrily churning drills with her disregard for their hunger as she moved toward the lever for the air hatch, an elegant movement of body lines that belied her power. Shimmers of blue unconsciously materialized around her, deflecting the stone gnats that approached her. She danced with the ice.

Then she hand sprung to the ground and in a flurry of motion that rivalled the tornado of ice built inside the broken funnel, she honed in on one person after another, driving them to the safety of cover, providing impossible rescue. She moved so quickly that his mind was still processing that the dangerous accident had occurred when she was pulling him under the first conveyor belt.

She reached out next towards the Jaw Jumper. He watched with helpless horror as a rock of ice, larger than the one that crushed Murso, flew toward the two of them. Scintillating, blue energy engulfed them and for the rest of his days Charval wondered if it wasn't divine light. The asari lay on the ground, shaken but unharmed. The ice was at her feet, tamed.

Charval wasn't the only one staring when she withdrew from the work room. So were the many people who should have been dead.

Her frustration grew when Falindra left the work floor. She felt the eyes of everyone on her. If she had saved even one life then she felt blessed by the Goddess for having been given the power and she was grateful for the surge of biotic strength she managed to invoke without her Savant IV available. The problem with that sort of display was that now every member of Dread Claw besides Drau Mar had their curiosity piqued about her origins and her abilities. They'd be watching her movements which meant she'd have to be even more cautious. It meant letting opportunities slip by. Mar and the other krogan had seen the sort of physical maneuvers in her arsenal. She'd be less likely to catch them by surprise if they forced her into a brawl. Whatever might be said about Dread Claw's entrepreneurial talents, the Drau were skilled and potent warriors. She hoped to rely on their ignorance of an asari commando's abilities, to give her some advantage in a melee, but that was far less likely now.

She cursed.

Drin busied himself in the Environmental Room with repairs to a coolant system, completely ignorant of the havoc that happened in the adjoining building.

"You're about to be made awfully busy and I'm sorry to add to it," she began, "but Drau Zugo is going to ask you to see about fixing his omni-tool. I'd be in your debt – again – if you told him it was damaged by ice." She threw him the cable she managed to pilfer from the krogan's side during the commotion. "But I'll let you decide."

Drin blinked at the cable. She continued on her way before he had time to respond.

She returned up to the ground floor to discover a new commotion had evolved in her absence. Drau Bodiix had returned from a failed raid against one of the rival outlaw habitats on Yagi. Four members of his assault team failed to return, krogan and vorcha, two apiece. Slaves and fringe merchants scattered from his presence, scrunching arms against their sides, desperately making thin profiles of themselves. If through sheer force of will they had the power to turn invisible, they would have all evaporated into the air.

Bodix thundered in circles around the work floor, surveying the damage, a lumbering predator sensing that his den had been disturbed during his absence. The universe conspired to set his mood into the foulest temperament possible. If he caught scent of who to finger as the culprit, no one suspected the hapless individual had any luck of surviving the accusation. His battle scarred retinue of armed followers, Gursk among them, joined in inspecting destroyed equipment. Rocks of ice had damaged the conveyor belts, the second funnel, sorting bins, power lines, and a computer terminal.

He studied the beheaded vorcha corpse on the ground, nudged it without sentiment with his toe, and made inquiries. Even Drau Gorba was nervous. The Dread Claw's leader showed yellowed canines; a line of spittle hung from his lip.

Hastings was caught in the Drau's path and given Bodix mood, did not believe he'd be spared on the technicality that he was an indentured servant rather than slave.

Hastings liked to think he was self-reliant – and far better at facing the perils of the Terminus than most humans. He was tough. He'd killed men for small gains if the risk of consequences were smaller. When dishonest mercantilism became unavailable, he never shirked from piracy. He'd lived on or visited a score of uncharted settlements that housed every sort of deranged outlaw the abyssal reaches of the galaxy offered. But when Bodix's horrible, pock-marked face filled his line-of-sight, those sunken red eyes dug into him, pillaged whatever peace remained in his dirty soul.

'Tell me what happened," Bodix said, voice deep and titan strong. "Do not lie. Were you on safety monitor duty?"

Falindra watched. She rarely saw the leader of the Dread Claw, who far preferred spending his time raiding other settlements, and heard him speak even less. Despite the disdain she felt for Hastings, she pitied the hapless human for the predicament he landed in. Some of the slaves also looked on from different areas of the room where they sat partially hidden.

There are different kinds of fear. Falindra knew most of them. Fear during unexpected disaster, that's panic. The current fear was trepidation, the slow, unavoidable wait for the terror that can't be avoided. The long journey into battle.

"No, not today," Hastings stammered. "Murso was monitor. Over there." He pointed toward the battered remains of a computer station, then at what remained of the salarian, Murso, flattened against the wall a distance further.

Bodix appraised the situation. Gorba nodded confirmation that Hastings spoke truthfully about the day's duty assignments.

After a long, considerate pause, Bodix released a single bellow of laughter. "Then fate already provided a lesson to fools." With that conclusion, the menace in his eyes abated. Tension lifted throughout the room. Vallon's arms relaxed. Charval extricated himself from food storage (few people realized the salarian had been in the room). Lonwabo Mbatha willed his imaginary invisibility away. Muriel braved showing a smile at the corner of her mouth.

Falindra still kept her guard. She suspected that once Bodix's wrath had been roused, appeasement did not come easily. That he had the patience for it to simmer was worse. If the object of his anger was only damaged machinery, the matter might be settled. But he returned to home defeated, the latest battle lost, and the slaves knew. He'd not abide their gaining that knowledge without reasserting his domination. For a krogan that meant someone needed to suffer.

Kenji Tsukamoto approached the three asari at their table while they ate dinner that evening in the mess hall. The twelve paces were not easy. Asari made him nervous, their exotic beauty. The idea of a species that was exclusively female left him unsettled. He'd always been shy around women and imagined an entire people composed of the more mysterious gender would see him as something superfluous.

The effort was made harder by the nasty vorcha duo, Skeb and Kryts. They watched the asari with malice and fascination and their eyes turned to him because he approached their proximity.

He swallowed, debating whether he ought to listen to the fear that the vorcha so easily supplied and return to his table. He needed to do this, though, to speak with her, the one who moved with the reflexes of Grecian heroes and saved lives. If she braved mortal risk, he'd find the courage to walk past a pair of bullies. He held Santina's hand in his own and stood between her and the vorcha, shielded her from Skeb's sight. Kenji possessed no answer for acting this way. The guards surely saw Santina and the middle-aged Japanese man held no delusions about his own ability to dash spastically throughout the room, dodging bodily harm – or withstanding it on the girl's behalf.

Earth seemed a strange memory. Kenji Tsukamoto still held the slenderness of youth but his face revealed the worry lines that came from the failures of his life. He never held an inclination for business, but received an education in commerce at his family's choosing. He entered the professional world as an investor, found a job in Tokyo after completing a Master's Degree in Attican Futures Trade, and became an expert on economic development in the Ismar Frontier even though he'd never been there and had no intention of ever going. He survived, uninspired by his job and uninspiring in his performance. During layoffs he was cut in the first round.

His performance at Tanadi Motors was worse. Less inspired, less inspiring. He reached the age of forty with only debt and dust to show. He had no family because the infrequent occasion he managed to acquire a date, the women saw in him the same quality as his employers: a decent fellow who always looked sad.

After three jobs and a doomed career and weary of the lies he shared to his ailing mother about a fulfilled life, Kenji Tsukamoto found himself in the North American city of Vancouver one weekend at the tail end of a botched interview. That's when and where he learned about opportunities on the colonial worlds in the Attican Traverse. He'd read reports thousands of times about these distant settlements as part of his jobs. After twenty years spent theorizing about those worlds he found himself, for the first time, unimaginably, drawn to seeing one, touching the soil of lands that did not carry the memory of disapproving forefathers.

It helped that he learned about the opportunity during a parade. Systems Alliance marines were being honored for their stand against the Reapers. Again. There was always a celebration or commemoration somewhere, some of them genuine, attended by enthusiastic audiences; some were political spectacles, gambits that promised people a better future. Kenji did not buy the promise. Dismal, middle-aged men have a low tolerance for the scripted declarations of celebrities, even war heroes.

That's when Kenji decided to leave Earth, at aged forty-two, never before having journeyed further than the moon. His first deep space journey, a fantastic new chapter in his life, the fleeting optimism of youth bloomed again. A new start. A rebirth.

He never even reached his destination. The passenger shuttle that carried him was waylaid by the Dread Claw during a pirate run. Renewed prospects ended abruptly.

In all those years he'd only met four asari, each time at conferences where the aliens had been guest speakers. He'd shared conversation with only one of them and that was as part of a crowd. His only other knowledge of the asari came from the images of them used to sell fashion magazines and wrinkle creams. Hey ladies, want to look five hundred years younger? Nobody does it better than blue-skinned vixens who lived when London watched the first performance of Hamlet, fresh from the playwright's quill

It's hard talking to magazine covers, harder when those magazine covers might think of your grandparents as petulant children. And Kenji berated himself, trying to remember her name. Calling her the 'Pissy Dentist' while thanking her for saving his life didn't seem quite right.

"Miss Foul," he said in his native tongue. She ignored him. Had he mistaken the pronunciation? Blundered some crucial step in etiquette? He'd always taken pride in remembering the subtle protocols of new acquaintanceships, but how were introductions handled with asari? Should he bow? Shake hands? Dance? Perform ritual sacrifice?

"Miss Foul," he repeated and stepped close. This time she looked up, though he suspected it was more because of his proximity than his calling her name. "Captain Foul, I mean. I heard one of the vorcha calling you that."

She didn't say anything so he continued. "Santina here thought you might speak Japanese." He stood aside so that the girl had room to smile her greetings.

"I do," said Falindra, surprised to discover that her one human language came in handy after all. She rested her utensils in the unfinished bowl of grey multi-vitamin paste sitting in on the table.

"I wanted to thank you for saving my life. I wish I might repay your bravery. Sadly, I've no gifts to offer and lack the eloquence to express my gratitude justly. There is nothing about me that warrants another person risking death for my rescue." He stopped before humility became self-loathing. "I'm indebted," he summarized.

"You're not in my debt. I'm glad you live." Falindra punctuated each word, hoping to alleviate the guilt in his eyes.

She'd seen it during the Reaper War when she saved hundreds of civilians from Reaper troops. On Mannovai and Niacal. On Cyone. Some people were grateful. As many were angry and cursed their rescuers as culprits of war. An equal number became ashamed of the discovery that they felt only fear and vulnerability during a crisis while self-assured members of the Serrice Guard performed daring feats of rescue.

Kenji looked to Santina and spoke in the girl's tongue before returning his attention to Falindra. "Santina wants to thank you as well. She is very thankful."

Falindra wished he'd finish. She liked Kenji. She noticed his quiet, gentle nature before the accident. Noticed that, besides Muriel, he seemed to be the only human watching out for Santina in lieu of parents. But praise made her feel awkward. What were the human gestures for expressing the pleasure of new acquaintanceship, and 'please leave' in the kindest of departing terms? Each human culture was different and many existed. She was supposed to nod her head, offer a hug, or stick out her tongue, one of the three.

The girl rushed up and gave Falindra a hug, little arms applying more pressure than a starved body ought to be able to provide. Falindra hugged back and, pleased to have an answer to her quandary, she rose and hugged Kenji. He seemed taken aback by the gesture. Even though another human initiated the little ritual, he averted his eyes when their bodies parted, blushed and he shuffled back several steps. Her wish was granted, but she didn't understand his reaction. Humans were strange.

Two more figures approached the Serrice asari. Tasa'Nel and Trez'Kailer had yet to share words with her primarily because they had no common words to share and because the quarians learned from experience that members of other species rarely wished to mingle with them. That had changed marginally after the Quarian Fleet's contribution to the Reaper War. Emphasize 'marginally'.

The two had learned Drau commands that were exchanged when they worked, imperatives like 'stop', and 'hurry', and 'watch out' (the latter employed uselessly during the ice siege), but nothing else. After work at the ice drills ended each day the two quarians kept their own company.

They decided to change their stance when it came to Falindra. Trez had already been curious about Falindra for some time, and that curiosity grew after he tracked her brief sojourn out of the habitat.

The two quarians approached the slave community's translator, Sye Videl, and asked for his assistance. He grinned, all too pleased for having the pretext to speak with Falindra. He never needed an excuse to approach her, but having one made it easier.

The drell sat down beside her and presented the quarians with a solemnity that overshadowed the usual attempts at dashing charm he displayed. He introduced them by their formal names: Tasa'Nel nar Bellapay, the lithe youth, her feminine form enclosed by the blue-tinted environmental suit she wore; and Trez'Kailer vos Landish, slightly older and whose bronze outfit draped over him like the cloak from an opera's set of costumes.

They hovered near each other like kin, and, in fact, were mistaken for siblings by the salarians. Just as some slaves learned to despise one another within a short period of time, others learned to find intimacies. When your existence becomes this bleak, the bond established with someone who shares the ruin can develop, powerful and quick. They had never met prior to their capture, but Tasa looked to the older quarian as a brother. Trez had been reluctant to approach the heroine who'd rescued several people's lives earlier, but complied at Tasa's insistence.

"They wanted to express their gratitude as well," Sye explained, guessing that the humans standing at Falindra's other side had approached her for the same reason.

"I don't think I saved either of them," said Falindra.

"That's not the point," said Sye, with surprising force. "Hell, I want to thank you. It's not like you pulled me to the ground when the ice started flying." Though she'd be more than welcome to pull him to the ground whenever the mood suited her. He kept that thought private. "But if you hadn't shut the lid anyone of us might have been struck by the ice."

"I recall that Trez'Kailer proved his mettle. I saw him shut the power while the vorcha and krogan scrambled. Give him my gratitude in kind, Sye." She gazed into Trez'Kailer's elliptical eyes that shone through his suit's visor. The two locked gazes, studied each other.

Sye forwarded Falindra's praise with the quarians. Not forwarded. Liberally reworded and filled gaps where needed. Sye was unburdened by the code of ethics that professional translators held. He decided that Falindra's response needed embellishment to sound more generous. Clearly she knew nothing about bartering favors from people in her debt.

"She is thrilled you're alive. Has been grinning about it." His face became animated. "Thinks you're both heroes the way you kept your wits. She hopes you'll have her friendship and if you ever need her help, she'd be the first to arrive. The first. She'll make the Migrant Fleet look downright lazy coming to the rescue."

Yelps of pain erupted through the vents without warning. They came from Building B loud enough for everyone to hear. Deep and guttural screams. Falindra saw by the faces of Kenji and the two asari that they thought the same thing she feared: another accident. Someone else was injured.

Tasa and Sye frantically guessed who might be in trouble, counting heads to see who was absent from the mess hall, but Falindra already knew. Only batarians possessed the vocal cords for those howls.

The screams did not stop. A few seconds later a new wave of cries made a metallic echo through the vents. The listeners slowly understood that there had been no accident. Drau Bodix had found subjects upon which to release the rage that had been building since his band's failed venture. He returned to find his business enterprise inoperable. Anyone who believed that such anger would evaporate unnoticed was misguided.

Bols had been operating the ice drill before it went haywire. He should have been the first to see trouble brewing and the first one ending it. Ralik's crime was worse. Bols's transgression had been brought on by negligence but Ralik intentionally chose to damage the conveyor belt when he tore the section from the floor and flipped it for cover. The two batarians no longer had the fortune of counting themselves as favored slaves.

Kenji winced as a fresh series of screams arrived from below. His whole body stiffened until he thought paralysis set in.

Santina pressed her body tight against his leg as though it was hollow and she might climb inside and discover a safer world. He wished he possessed the power of miracles, some faerie tale enchantment that transported the daredevil girl with her wild thicket of hair to a world of talking rabbits and chocolate flowers and absolutely no krogan.

Fear and shame mixed together. Fear was obvious; the shame came every time someone else received Dread Claw discipline besides him. Kenji had to face the relief of being a bystander and not the victim. Then he had to watch – or listen. Listening was worse.

Even Falindra (he still thought of her as Captain Foul) found the screams intolerable, he saw, evident by the pale color of her knuckles. Her fist throttled the handle of her mug and her other hand clenched the table's edge. Sye stared with false fascination toward an invisible speck on the floor. His whole body seemed darker, overcome by shadow. The other asari seated at the table, Elayda and Caleen, grew solemn, absently stirring gruel with their forks in haphazard unison. Kenji found it impossible to read the moods of quarians through their masks. He guessed they felt the same. Across the room he saw that the salarians looked no better. He'd become an amateur expert at reading alien facial expressions, but was only familiar with the tragic ones. The salarian called Charval Potes trembled and shut his eyes tight.

All the slaves despised Bols and Ralik. The two had bullied every slave at some point during their shared occupation of the habitat. They stole the most inconsequential properties: an old shirt, work gloves full of holes, a scavenged flashlight. When nothing was left to steal, they resorted to old fashioned abuse. That hatred for the batarians didn't change simply because they were now on the receiving end of a worse beating than they had ever doled out. That did not negate the empathy the listeners felt. How could you not tremble when hearing agony applied with such persistence? Even Falindra displayed growing tension while the audience heard the fresh rounds of torture. Her fight with the batarians had become well circulated gossip. Anyone shy of psychotics empathized. Anyone besides the Dread Claw.

Falindra couldn't listen anymore. She catapulted her legs out from under the table as she pushed out with her arms. The movement was so fast and unexpected that her ring of admirers all fell back, startled. Without sharing a word she left them behind and proceeded toward Building B.

Kryts watched her with undisguised glee, anticipating the fight she planned to start. Falindra shot him a fierce glare, daring him to intervene. He kept out of her way, if only because he wanted to see her take the next beating from the krogan. The orders from Drau Bodix were firm, no harm to the latest asari arrival. He made examples of a few vorcha who skirted the edge of those orders. But if the krogan boss disobeyed his own commands then Kryts was content to stand aside and allow it to happen.

She moved down the ramp in the connector tunnel, through the lattice of poor lighting and past the refuse that piled at the bend. She heard the rushed footfalls that followed behind, as committed as hers, as precise as they weaved around the bric-a-brac that lay strewn upon the ground along the corridor she next followed.

"Don't be rash," said Trez'Kailer once he caught. She had expected someone else followed, though experience told her the footfalls moved too deftly for Kenji and were too heavy for the other asari. She assumed it was Sye.

"Please return to the mess hall, Trez'Kailer. "

"Allow me to put emphasis on the word 'rash'. How many krogan do you think you'll find surrounding Ralik and Bols, because it won't just be Drau Bodix. The entire raiding party that went out with him today are looking for spilt blood where they come out the victors. That's six krogan right there, assuming Gorba and Zugo and Telx decided the restraint they show around us slaves deserves an outlet."

Falindra showed no sign of slowing down. The screams were louder, fueling her legs. Bestial krogan laughter made the sick knot in her gut worse.

"I'm not listening to that anymore and I'm not putting plugs in my ears so that gives me one alternative."

"Sure," continued Trez. "Get the batarians killed."

This caught Falindra unexpectedly and she pivoted her head toward him.

"That's what you want, right," he asked. "Nobody would blame you and I doubt they'd be missed." Her steps slowed. "Right now the Drau are having fun. They don't want to cripple able-bodied slaves. If you get them riled, they're apt to fly into Blood Rage. Ever see a krogan in Rage? I'm sure you have. A gang of them in confined space? It's like a herd of bovine with no stretch of land for stampede. Meat pulveriser. There'll be nothing left of the batarians – or you. Unless you have a scheme to offset that arm you're nursing."

Falindra finally stopped walking. She cursed in asari, but Trez guessed the rough meaning. He was right and she hated it. The biotic energy that exploded from her in a freak burst of adrenaline, shielding her and Santina against the indoor ice storm was desperate luck, and given her bruised arm, not wholly effective. Without her bio-amp the chances of her biotic powers being effective were miniscule.

She was more surprised that Trez sensed the way she nursed her arm. The pain had been acute during dinner when she lifted her tray of food with the injured arm. She thought she hid the weakness, but clearly Drin Haylar was not the only slave with observational skills. It must have something to do with surviving slavery that made civilians' senses sharper. Watch for trouble before it happens. Drin recognized her tattoos and drawn upon his extensive mental catalogue of trivia. Trez demonstrated subtler perceptions. Maybe he was no mere civilian. She knew nothing about him. It became too easy to categorize everyone in the habitat in one of two factions, Dread Claw or slave. Tasa, his female quarian counterpart, was a slave. Falindra had learned that much, but his position was more nebulous, another fringe merchant turned indentured laborer, like Hastings or the dead volus, except that he never claimed to be a merchant.

She approached an intersection in the corridors and turned away from the direction that had been unshakable moments before, dimly aware that she and Kenji now shared the same sense of self-loathing. Shame isn't an emotion; it's a plague. Her curiosity about Trez seemed to give his arguments a strange credence. She headed down the corridor away from the screams at a pace that made clear her preference for solitude.

Trez took the cue remained behind at the intersection.

"Thank you," she said over her shoulder, surprised by the coldness in her voice. The darkness swallowed her fast in the poorly lit catacombs of the dying habitat.

The tears welled in her eyes and fell down her face. She licked the saltiness of one tear that touched her lip. She remained peripherally aware of the tension in her body. Her fists tried stabbing through her pockets.

She rarely approached such danger detailed plans, and never had since joining the Serrice Guard. That was the hallmark of the legendary unit. Plan and then plan again. Prepare for contingencies. Know your ruse, the feints that and misdirection. Effective improvisation only came from being prepared. Frontal assaults were recipes for body counts on both sides in any fight. Most armies made no secret about preferring body counts to be one sided, but few of them equalled the Serrice Guard's talent for proving that reality after the last bullet had been fired.

Maybe her frustration came from something else entirely. The batarians' pain only triggered the anguish that had long been brewing.

She found a tiny alcove in the Reclamation Room where the floor had partially collapsed and sat down, knees to her chest. Nobody was likely to look for her here, if they were looking. The room reeked of pungent fruit and fecal matter. The scraps of waste had long ago disintegrated into nothingness (the Dread Claw simply ejected their refuse outdoors, finding recycling too complicated and bothersome); but the stench, with nowhere to escape, lingered.

The tears came freely.

She'd been part of a team on the Nefrane, proud and with purpose. Each scar on the hull was a symbol of honor, proof of a battle braved. Her combat sisters understood each other's minds, moved around each other during naval engagements with the fluidity of an organic machine, manning consoles, maintaining weapons panels. They evolved into a sisterhood. The wall behind her workstation became a collage of images of their collective loved ones, the disparate family trees that grew interconnected on deck twelve, port side.

She accepted the offer to join the Serrice Guard with mixed feelings. The honor of being selected was undeniable – and not to be denied – but the fear of knowing she'd never serve with her comrades on the Nefrane again…. There are all types of fear and she had felt most of them during battle, inside the innards of a ship that vibrated with every impact it sustained. But it had been a different fear she'd known only once before: when she first left home, a sad fear.

After Falindra overcame nostalgia, she took to commando training with zeal. She found a new family within her squad, one that she knew, with time, lent itself to the strong bonds of kinship she knew in the navy. The Serrice Guard welcomed and supported her with the same degree of camaraderie. Her supervisor, Talere, never scoffed at the inexperience of a recruit. She relished the innovation an outsider brought, the new perspective. And truth be told, for all the sentiment that the Nefrane held in her heart, its crew functioned as navy crews must. Each member knew her tasks by rote, had to if the Nefrane was to survive the frenzy of engagement. When the explosions begin, when battle damage starts internal fires and collapses bulkheads, the crew must perform without thinking. Manning a position goes along with breathing. There is unshakable rhythm when each is done properly. Falindra could look forward to decades of that linear growth. Promotion, if she was good enough, might require learning new skills that would also become rote in time. As much as she loved the Nefrane and dreaded leaving it, the honor of acceptance into the Serrice Guard only half explained what lured her away. Some tiny seed in her soul feared the rote mindset of ship-bound life. The only measured virtues were performing skills with greater efficiency than on previous attempts. Some part of her craved the unorthodox that comes with personal flare. She did not want to fire a gun faster or more accurately than starboard's gun crew. She wanted to fire it in ways nobody ever thought to try. How many ways a gun might possibly be fired was moot; she stood by the allegory. It's what the Serrice Guard demanded and what they offered. Unexpected answers to impossible questions, answers formed by the personality you had. It was how Talere, Lolani, Falindra and the rest of the squad dazzled the salarians during the defense of Mannovai, how six of them held off legions of husks and marauders in the Lunivenn Hills on Thessia. If she served with her unit half as long as she'd toured with the Nefrane, Falindra knew she'd feel an even greater sense of place and purpose, of kinship with her battle sisters.

Only they never had time to nurture their relationship. Half her squad died in the Reaper War. The rest became scattered in the aftermath. She was without her military family. The Serrice Guard found its ranks so depleted after the war concluded, its services direly needed on so many fronts, they could no longer afford to hold squad unity for deep recon assignments. The Guards became intelligence gatherers as much as commandos. She hadn't seen her other three surviving squad mates since before she sought the human Walbeck for information and was betrayed to the Dread Claw.

While the Guard's commando training was unsurpassed, their intelligence operations clearly held room for improvement, if she was an example of their achievements in the field.

She glanced around at the rusted bins of waste that filled the room, praying for wisdom found through meditative staring at random objects. The screams and the demonic chorus of mocking laughter had died out. She heard silence instead, as palpable as the cruel sounds which preceded it.

This was her life, without crew or squad, alone in her botched investigation and fumbled intelligence gathering, adrift in the surreal civilization where slaves and overseers danced the steps of false community between moments of sheer terror, and she struggled not to lose herself to despair. She tried meditating, tried finding a sense of the goddess in the pantheistic universe where the divine might be found in small things, the touch and smell of the things around her, even the wretched ones.

Footsteps arrived from the corridor. At first, she guessed that Trez had decided a moment's privacy sufficed before pursuing her, or maybe he worried that she'd said words he wanted to hear simply to be rid of him, to cause mischief undisturbed. The coming intruder ambled too heavily to be the quarian.

The single functioning light fixture that gave illumination to the room was lazy about lazy at casting the shadow that came through the threshold. Falindra braced herself for the possibilities, a slave who planned to offer further gratitude or words of caution. One of the vorcha might have wanted to mimic the krogans' entertainment. Maybe someone spied her entering the room, the look of preoccupied distress clear on her face, and thought she made an easy victim to steal from. It was hardly unprecedented for one of the slaves or former merchants to prey upon another. Ragged shoes that might be discarded in the luxuries of civilized lands were prizes worth fighting over in the habitat. And she had useful shoes. Then there was Hastings, who'd been shooting her evil eyes since their fight. He assumed the odds of him winning their brawl were assured and the humiliation of being proved wrong festered, building its need for vengeance. His shame was not the kind she and Kenji knew; it was the dangerously bruised pride of a vain man.

She scanned the room for weapons. Rebar, screws, scraps of metal, anything. Weapons always proved available if you were clever. Preparation and planning were admired qualities in the Serrice Guard. So was improvisation. The intake arm of an old engine perched from the nearest bin. It would serve as an effective bludgeoning instrument. The small propeller shaft of a fan lay on the ground two strides from her feet. Its pointed end could cripple nerve bundles.

"Who's in here," growled a vorcha. "Me smell you."

Falindra wiped tears from her cheek before announcing her presence, readied herself if she needed to pounce for the propeller shaft. The vorcha came to the recess where she hid and stood over her briefly before descending onto his haunches and sitting opposite her. It was too dark to identify Gursk by the rich brown shade of his hide, but she recognized the yellow blotches along his shoulders, his amber eyes. He carried his beloved abacus in hand. That was certainly the tell-tale detail.

"I wanted to be alone," she pouted succinctly.

"Me too," said Gursk, crouched and head jutting out from his shoulders. "This one of my special places. Nobody comes here except me." He added: "and you, me guess,"

'Sorry if I've intruded." Falindra wrinkled her nose, confused. "You smelt me under the odors of this room? That doesn't sound good."

"Me got good nose."

"It's not as though I'm wearing perfume."

He sounded out 'blaaghh' with a dramatic display from his tongue to emphasize his disdain for artificial fragrances. "Me hate them smells fancy people wear. You smell… proper. Lots of dirt, your own sweat. Me like that."

"I'm glad to hear, but do me a kindness in the future and avoid describing my body odor when complimenting me."

Gursk shrugged his shoulders, sat down, and stared at the ground, perplexed by her presence, uncertain what to say next. "Went looking for you. Kryts said you went to kill krogan. All them krogan still alive." He sighed. She wondered whether he lamented that he missed watching a fight or that the Drau lived.

"And the batarians, Ralik and Bols."

"Them alive, too."

"But how are they?"

"Alive," he repeated, uncertain what further detail she needed. Self-consciously, he played with the abacus, sliding bolts back and forth along their wires.

Falindra enjoyed watching his efforts at mastering the contraption and let him figure out the solution to some mathematical problem in silence.

"You really like that device Drin made for you," she said after a few minutes, more composed than she felt when he first arrived.

"Much. Mechano-Man my best friend. Gave me gift."

Falindra released a brief laugh in response to the nickname. Her emotions were too near the surface. A laugh came as easily as the weeping. She sounded out the syllables of Drin's nickname. "Thanks to you the humans call me Captain Foul."

"You're welcome," he replied, oblivious to her sarcastic undertones.

She let out a sigh that caught his attention. He scrutinized the marks on her face. Tears left winding trails across grime that had built up after weeks of labor in the confines of dirty, recycled air. "You've been crying," he observed and sounded perplexed by the notion. "Me thought you some soldier. Captain even."

"Soldiers can't cry?"

"Me never seen one do it."

"So you think less of someone for it?"

He paused, considered his answer with surprising tact. "Vorcha do not approve." His eyes hazed with memory. He shook himself with force until the thought disappeared and returned his gaze to the abacus. "But me don't think it so wrong."

"You've been hanging out with too many krogan. And turians and humans for that matter. They all have this obsession about stripping emotional depth from their soldiers, replacing it with lots of bravado and bluster. Thinks it makes them sustainable, better soldiers. Better killers."

"Seems smart," he replied.

"Sure. Except those emotions were never really gone, just buried, unchecked, uncared for while they festered. Too many turian and human soldiers wind up aiming pistols at their own temples. That's what happens when armies pretend soldiers have no emotions."

"Shooting self, very bad. Me learned that hard way." Gursk pointed toward his foot where Falindra saw one missing toe, which constituted half the number that belonged there.

"You did that to yourself?"

"Twice. Used to have a stub. First time was just curious to see what happened. Second time accident."

"You shot yourself twice." Falindra repeated in disbelief.

"Learned me lesson well," he declared triumphantly.

Falindra leaned against the wall on her left side, keeping the tender arm away from pressure, and forced herself not to grin. You acquire a gallows humor after serving with a military branch for any length of time, but chuckling at someone who lost body parts seemed a tad impolitic.

"That first time when you were curious, couldn't you have made an educated guess instead?"

Gursk grunted, as if to say hindsight always made the wise choice clear. "You nurse arm. That bruise from rock of ice that hit you?" he asked.

Falindra nodded and with the weakness revealed, felt free to massage her throbbing shoulder. Between Gursk and Trez she clearly wasn't as good at hiding her injuries as she thought. Gursk pressed the tip of his tongue into the hole in his gums where a canine tooth used to be before Drau Gorba knocked it out. The two of them made such a healthy looking pair, she mused.

"I was lucky that I channeled my biotic barrier; it kept the ice from crushing my arm; but I wasn't strong enough to deflect the impact entirely, not while missing my implant. Without an anti-inflammatory gel, it's going to hurt for a few days.

"So long? You not going to regenerate?" Gursk's eyes widened with shock at the length of recovery time she expected.

"Asari don't regenerate the way vorcha do."

Gursk gave a surprised expression, his eyes wide, his mouth contorting into a funny frown of amazed befuddlement. "Me had no idea asari were inferior species."

"Our secret's out." She grimaced as a fresh wave of pain webbed its way through. Her body seemingly agreed with Gursk's assessment. "Anyway, to answer your original question. Asari soldiers are trained to accept and welcome our emotions, so long as they're channelled at chosen moments. We train to keep them in check during battle, then release them later. During prayer or meditation, maybe exercise or through painting. We become ourselves when the fight is over. A trained asari commando possesses a duality of spirits. It's more difficult than simply repressing half your psyche; needed to survive centuries of military duty without one's mind becoming shattered." It was how she wept tears in privacy minutes before, shifted to the mindset needed for confrontation when she heard footsteps approach in the corridor, and then released those mental defenses when she determined there was no threat. Pressure valve in the brain: turn one way to release emotions, turn another and they became safely caged, out of the way. Controlling that valve at will was the trick, the true test of discipline, and a needed one for an individual sworn to military service not for years, but decades, possibly centuries.

He nodded while his fingers discovered that seven times two equaled a large, double-digit number. He did listen, though, Falindra realized. He did not interrupt or give unwanted advice. Maybe what she expressed, or failed to convey except in nuance, was too complex for the emotional makeup of a vorcha, but he came to her side and remained until her anguish subsided.

It was impossible to say who was more surprised, Gursk or her, as she leaned over, grabbed him by the shoulder, and gave him a firm kiss on the forehead.

She rose to her feet. "Do me a favor, Gursk. Find the salarian, Vallon Corla, and bring him to the rec room."

He tilted his head, confused. "Plan to kiss him, too?"

She pursed her lips. "No." After thinking over her decision a moment, Falindra added, "bring the human, Muriel as well and Sye Videl."


	9. Chapter 9

The recreation room existed in name only. Derelict vending machines lined the south wall. The machine with see-through plastic panels that once displayed rotating trays of pre-packaged lunches, now offered a window into the civilization of molds that bulged where ham sandwiches once existed. Three electronic game tables sat parallel, two of them gutted for spare parts and the last flashing the words 'game over' through a spider web of cracked glass. A small bar built into the corner of the room looked plundered. Emptied bottles lay toppled on the wall behind it, shattered ones lay on the beige carpeting all around. Splintered stools formed a semi-circle around it.

The two batarians claimed this bastion as their domain. In a habitat that had been abandoned, looted, settled by squatters, raided, then occupied by krogan outlaws, the one room with something besides cold tiles on the floor was enviable territory, even if that something consisted of broken parts.

The added devastation unleashed by the krogan was obvious. The demolished dining area opposite the bar had been intact several weeks ago. Falindra saw it during one of her 'jogs' reconnoitering the room when the batarians were elsewhere. Synth-wood tables and chairs lied in broken pieces. They had not been swept aside or kicked clear of the most used walking space the way older debris got tossed. Plaster dust still clouded the air; someone had been thrown into the east wall. It, too, had been reduced to fragments. The outer skin of plaster cracked and crumbling revealed the guts of budget insulation and high-density radiation shielding connecting the support beams.

Bols sat against the wall, legs slung over part of the broken dining table, the cartilage running along the center of his face broken in several places, a few fingers in equally bad shape. He grunted as he held an arm against bruised ribs and dabbed his finger at the myriad spots of pain, testing which ones bled. The answer was more than a few.

Ralik groaned through semi-consciousness, in even worse shape than Bols, stretched out on the ground near the vending machines. His face already swelled beyond recognition. Falindra only identified him by default. Blood covered his face. A stranger would never know that his skin color was a grey shade underneath.

Falindra had an informed opinion that both men were thugs, watched them bully other slaves. Despite this, she pitied them. First they suffered a surprize beating at her hands, no doubt a dosage of humiliation alongside it – and now they'd been pummeled so badly that permanent damage was probable without adequate medical attention. And the Dread Claw did not seem like the thoughtful sort of pirates that kept a trauma surgeon in their employ.

She walked toward Ralik, the more severely injured of the duo, and crouched by his side. His lower-right eye socket was pulverized into a puffy, discolored mess that looked like some dead jellyfish surrounding the ruin of what had once been his eye.

Falindra ripped off a patch from her shirt. She found a sink behind the bar and dabbed the torn cloth under cold water before returning to his side. He mumbled incoherently while she applied it against the collection of swollen wounds.

"Krogan really have the worst tempers," she said quietly while she examined his other injuries.

"They never even went into blood-rage," said Bols from behind her and followed it with several hacking coughs. He spat a gob of blood-laced phlegm against the wall.

"Looks to me like they had more than enough rage," she said, but knew he was right. If the krogan blood-rage piqued during the gang-up, Bols and Ralik would be corpses. She noted that neither of them had injuries along their legs. Each still possessed a single functioning arm. The krogan made sure their servants still had some capacity for performing tasks in the processing centre. Drau Bodix's aspirations of becoming lunar warlord were balanced with ruthless entrepreneurial acumen.

Gursk arrived a short while later with a cluster of followers in toe. He approached her, abacus in hand, and proudly showed her how many people he brought by displaying red hex nuts.

"Five," she confirmed in case he counted wrong.

"Correct," he said, impressed that she deciphered the code, proving her math skills might be on par with Mechano-Man's. "Job done and then some. The two you asked for refused to come alone. That okay?"

"Perfect. Thanks Gursk." She had counted on the added escorts. An order to follow without explanation gave Vallon and Muriel each a fright. Gursk lacked the authority for making unquestioned demands. If Drau Bodix or Gorba gave the order, the humans and salarians would have followed with prayers to be alive by day's end; but with Gursk they each insisted on companions.

The entourage surveyed the damaged room from the doorway with an appreciation of what the batarians suffered, if the aftermath gave any accurate hint. Satisfied that they had not been summoned for an impromptu gladiator fight, Vallon and Muriel entered. Odds were that the krogan looked for better sport than unfit, middle-aged humans and salarians. The two sighed in a surreal moment of unison. Two aliens from different parts of the galaxy a mirror of one another in the expression of relief.

Their cohorts followed them into the room. Kenji Tsukamoto, the Japanese man whose language Falindra spoke with moderate fluency entered with the lean Lonwabo Mbatha from Botswana. The only other salarian was Charval Potes. He moved with the fluidity that let him appear unexpectedly across the work floor, or go unnoticed entirely. Sye Videl trailed in later.

"I appreciate your willingness to come," said Falindra once in Serrice Asari, once in Japanese. Sye was quick to translate into Salarian and English.

The attendees muttered, confused, trying to fathom that Gursk, one of the Dread Claw, a violent vorcha, had brought them here under the bidding of another slave like them. In the social order formed among the habitat's inhabitants, such an alliance was unprecedented, a conspiracy among members of rival gangs. At least one of the two had turned traitor to their caste. The important question for the other slaves to answer was whether they were the ones being betrayed.

"You're welcome to keep standing idly. I really hoped you might help treat some of these injuries," Falindra said while she stripped off another patch from her shirt and applied it firmly against a wound on Ralik's neck. The first fragment of cloth was soaked red, which she squished into a ball and tossed on the floor.

Never settling for becoming anyone's fool, Muriel moved into action as soon as Sye finished the translation, words he conveyed with mixed regret. He hoped Falindra might continue tearing strips from her shirt and reveal the taut abdomen hidden underneath. He wondered how sadistic it was for hoping batarians needed a long time before wounds scabbed over. With luck, Ralik might bleed until Falindra barely had any shirt left.

Okay, that thought, he conceded, was unapologetically sadistic.

He doubted the other slaves held more sympathy in their hearts for the two maimed men lying down in the ransacked room.

Muriel rummaged through drawers behind the bar until she discovered the contents of one that made her harrumph with wry satisfaction. She retrieved a collection of dishtowels and brought them over, unceremoniously dropping them on the floor by Falindra's side.

"There, that should be enough to keep the two of them from staining what's left of the carpet." She waited for Sye's translation before adding, "it's a perfectly nice carpet."

Falindra gently applied one to Ralik's forehead then folded another into quarters and placed it under his head. He groaned in pain, stirring into consciousness until he regained enough mobility to move his hand and keep the improvised gauze in place.

She returned to Bols's side and repeated applying towels, giving priority to whichever wounds bled the most.

"They need first aid," she said to the room. "Tell them, Sye."

"That's obvious. Nobody else cares."

"Tell them anyway." She rose to her feet with sudden swiftness that made him flinch. "Vallon and Muriel both received triage training as civilian recruits during the Reaper War. Time for a refresher."

For someone usually shy about socializing, he realized that Falindra was as astute at observing people as she was her surroundings. With so many language barriers she must have been listening and studying constantly to have pieced together the relevant skills of two different aliens. He wondered what truths she deciphered about him and became uncomfortable. Avoiding the lure of gossip in her vicinity was a wise future precaution.

After he provided the necessary translations, his audience became a collection of one sour face after another. He expected nothing else.

Muriel folded her arms against her chest and stuck her chin out proudly. It was the imperious and righteous stance of a seasoned middle school teacher or head nurse, a pillar of unbreakable stone disguised in human flesh. "The batarians are thugs. "They beat up Lonwabo and Louis more than once. Stole Jocelyn's canteen. It's karmic justice as far as I'm concerned."

Unaware of the words that came from Muriel's mouth, Vallon virtually repeated the sentiment. "Took three weeks for the bruises to disappear after they took my sweater. I would have given it to them if it meant I didn't ache every time I turned my head. The damn sweater was too small for them. Why did they even take it?" Veins stretched under his long, khaki neck. Fists were clenched into tiny balls.

Sye sank his head helplessly. His charismatic talents were brought to task, an opportunity he lucked upon where he might shine in Falindra's eyes through his success. Sye the Diplomat. Sye the Dealmaker. Instead, he had failed abysmally at conveying the request for aid. She was the proven warrior after saving him from being pulverised by the batarians for whom he now pleaded. He didn't mind that she knew how to break his bones a hundred different ways. Actually, he thought her ability to maim him surprisingly sexy. He accepted that she possessed a technical aptitude he lacked, even that her soul seemed encased in an aura of enigmas that made her far more tantalizing than him; but charisma was his one unrivaled virtue.

She laid her hand on his shoulder. "Don't give up. I hardly expected enthusiasm. They showed up. They want something to change, hoping this is an opportunity for something new in their lives. They want to be convinced." She saw his frustration, though mistook the spasm of pleasure in his shoulder at her touch for anxiety. He'd won favors and banked trust from the other captives as the unofficial translator, and that played to his advantage.

He tapped his shoulder gingerly with an index finger, a reminder of the injury he had suffered not long ago when drunken krogan allowed the two batarians to unleash their less savory natures upon him. "They treated you poorly, did they, Vallon? I have no idea what that's like. Get cramped in here long enough, made to eat gruel and work on the ice line, I defy any of you to tell me that you haven't day-dreamed about taking a heavy steel pipe to every single person in the habitat. Some of us are just more inclined to act out on those forbidden fantasies." A smile curled on the side of his lips as though the last words held innuendo that recalled a pleasant memory. "Sometimes it's also nice to fantasize about doing something that makes you the better person than you think you are."

"Not all of us are scoundrels who need to alleviate a soiled conscience," said Muriel, obstinate, arms folded across her chest. Her Irish accent punctuated the resolve in her words. Lonwabo Mbatha stepped closer to her side in a show of solidarity, his muscled arm gently brushing against her. Unconsciously, she gave a slight lean into arriving pressure. Sye knew from that near imperceptible gesture the mistake in allowing Lonwabo to come. The two humans were lovers. He wondered how they had hidden it this whole time. Privacy could be stolen from time to time in the darkened tunnels, particularly when the Dread Claws were preoccupied with raids. The atmosphere of rusted piping, stale recycled air, stained, beige walls, and menacing slaver pirates hardly seemed conducive to cultivating a romantic atmosphere. Still, Sye recalled fondly some trysts in his own past carried out in dingy vehicles and dingier hotels when secrecy was critical. He had a difficult time picturing Muriel indulging in sordid escapades.

The problem with their being lovers was that they decided their opinions in unity, chose together who to trust and who they should despise, had likely speculated during post coital discussions how they might work together in any of the thousand hypothetical events someone hopes might shatter the tedium of their wretched captivity. A passing acquaintance with the pair revealed quickly who had the iron personality and who possessed a passive one. Muriel had made up her mind the moment she assessed the situation and now Mbatha's support fueled her resolve. Worse, it might discourage others from being swayed.

"Falindra's no scoundrel," he said. He allowed none of the doubts and discoveries to damage his smile.

Gursk, bored and silently staring at the wall, spoke up finally. "Foul the Scoundrel. Hee, hee. It rhymes." He grinned, pleased with his sudden gift for poetry. It was his first contribution to the conversation. The others turned and stared.

"What of him," Muriel said. "Why is the vorcha here? Surely he's going to tell the krogan about how we're helping each other. How will they react, do you think? They're not going to like it at all. There's a reason they prefer us becoming little gangs. Keeps us divided."

"First, Gursk isn't going to tell the Dread Claw anything. We're not so dumb as to invite vorcha if we thought he was a risk. Second, if you help for no other reason, then how about the one you pointed out: do it because the krogan would hate the idea of us helping one another." Sye grew animated, arms spread theatrically wide, fingers snapping as he delivered each point. A gleeful energy shone in the curve of his lip, the surge of adrenaline, of the best of living, which came with the swindle, the charm and rhetoric that were his battlefield. The con.

The ceiling halogen tubes, starved of a steady, reliable flow of electrical current, flickered. Stage lights bowing to the moment. The spray of unexpected shadow leant a moment of gravity to the fury on Muriel's brow and the boldness on Sye's.

The fluctuating light caught Kenji's attention. He'd retreated to the doorway, occupied with the pretense of standing guard in case a krogan ambled by. In truth, the Japanese businessman who'd fled across the galaxy to hide from the shame of allowing success to elude him, found confrontation too uncomfortable. He was shy; he was gentle. The stress weighed on him, even as an observer, to watch people bicker.

"I think someone is coming," said Kenji, the nervousness plain on his face, and his fellow captives mistook the cause of anxiety to be for the dreaded someone who approached.

Except nobody was coming. Falindra counted on her trained senses. She'd hear footfalls from the outside corridor before Kenji. She also noted that he offered his warning the exact moment that his attention had been captured by the flutter of light.

Muriel also recognized that his timidity made for unreliable sentry duty, but seized the excuse. "We should leave before we're discovered. For all we know, one of the krogan has already noticed several of missing from our normal sleeping areas."

Vallon nodded agreement. "She's right," he added in solid support for a member of a species he ordinarily preferred to criticize. His large, salarian eyes, squinted contempt toward the prostrate men wounded on the floor.

The circle of slaves, armed with tattered clothes and dirty faces, challenged weeks and months of misery against one another. Sye, for all the persuasion in his argument, stepped gingerly around the outstretched batarians. He was a good liar in tone of voice, but his body told animal truths. Dark bruises and cracked bones had healed but the body remembered. Fear triggered unconscious spasms when he got too close to Ralik or Bols. The latter had regained consciousness and watched in brooding, injured silence.

In the sum of things, Sye feared and loathed the batarians. Even if they had never hurt him, he'd find it difficult to champion the cause of mercy on their behalf, not without tangible benefits to be received on the sly for his troubles. The epiphany about his own character shamed him; the knowledge that he had failed the mysterious woman who captured his carnal fantasies and, by all evidence, proved to be the more decent person.

In the desolation of smashed furniture and failing light the warped version of an inter-species council offered individual sneers. Muriel collected her entourage and Vallon collected his. Kenji, still standing beside the doorway, looked relieved to see the business coming to an end.

Except it didn't quite prove to be the finality on the issue that Muriel or Vallon wanted.

"Enough of this rubbish. Give me the damned needle," Charval Potes pushed past Vallon and made his way toward Falindra, taking careful measure to keep an arm's distance away from Gursk while he walked across the room.

"What are you doing," said Vallon, the timber of his voice almost comical, the shriek of irritation muted by the fear of raising his voice and attracting attention. "Get back here! We're leaving." Muriel had the unquestioned backing of the men who accompanied her. To lack the same support was a loss of face.

"I feel guilt for using pesticides on insects. I'm not about to watch these men bleed to death."

His wiry, half-starved frame moved with fluid grace. Falindra offered him a small knife instead of the needle, a sterilized one Drin had been kind enough to provide. "There are fragments of plastic in the wounds from whatever the krogan used. You'll need to remove those first." Looking about the debris that filled the room it was clear that half the furnishings had been turned into improvised weapons."

"All right." He took the knife, danced it across his fingers absent-mindedly, and examined the gaping crevice of a wound across Ralik's scalp. The blade became a silvery blur of circular motions. "This might hurt, but it's not my intention, so please don't get mad and, well… I'd consider it a kindness if you didn't beat my face into a paste."

Falindra scrutinized the salarian who found the nerves to defy his comrade and volunteer his aid. The fear that produced a treble in his vocal cords and made his large, oily eyes look a liquid black was belied by nimbleness of his fingers, the unexpected proficiency with which he moved the blade in somersaults around his hand. She never took note before of the peculiarity of his shirt, torn and filthy, yet originally made of finer organic textiles. The faded hue might have once been rich maroon. A seam along the cuff of his left sleeve gave evidence to a small, hidden pocket.

Who was he to have hidden pockets? The discovery unnerved her, served to remind of how little she knew about the vagabonds and victims she referred to as fellow captives. Lolani had been the closest thing to a cultural expert on Falindra's old squad, a trait prudently displayed during mission briefings and tactical updates. Falindra had absorbed all the information she could, secretly frightened of her first solo foray into the deadly, mercurial realm that lay beyond civilization like some impenetrable abyss of myth. The Dread Claw were her enemies, the identity and motivations of their employers her primary objective; but that left an ambiguous series of questions about the people who cropped up in between: the batarians whose aid she championed doubtlessly hid an unsavory tally of pirating exploits to their credit; the quarian, Trez'Kailer, who kept his wits when most civilians fell to panic; even Sye, the self-professed scoundrel, whose efforts to win her trust might prove the greatest suspicion of all. He failed to hide the anxiety provoked from being within arm's reach of the batarians, semi-conscious though they were. His discomfort was equally strong around her and Falindra had no idea why. She'd made no threats against him. Some hidden guilt or deceit made him uncomfortable around her. Now she had to add Charval to her list of individuals who warranted scrutiny.

Charval's fear and frayed nerves were abundantly plain in the muscle spasms around his large eyes. Was it an act? Those nerves did not affect the nimble hands that danced a blade between fingers.

He prepared to dig into Ralik's wounded arm for hidden shrapnel, and then paused: "now I'm trying to help you, so if I accidentally hurt you, please, please try not to beat my skull into the floor. I'll take any restraint on your part as a great kindness."

Ralik studied the reluctant nurse, who'd been on the receiving end of more than one occasional beating. Charval Potes first arrived at the facility with an impressive aud/vid manipulative projector for an omni-tool. Ralik had decided that he'd make the better owner. That was the first beating.

Ralik grunted compliance.

The narrow blade nosed its way into the first bleeding hole. Brownish blood trickled down the length of the arm, forming a red delta in the creases of skin. Ralik winced. So did Charval. The room was silent while the assembled humans and salarians silently looked on. Falindra kept her senses attuned to the possible approach of footsteps from the outside hallway.

"I think that's the last of the bits and pieces that fell into the wounds," said Charval. One tiny piece of misshapen plastic was stuck on the tip of the knife with gooey biological fluid. He flicked the knife with a violent wave to release the piece's hold.

"Good," said Falindra and handed him the needle and thread. "Time to stitch him up. Don't forget the injury on his brow."

"The giant chasm where someone tried dislodging a set of eyes from his face, yes I'll try not to overlook it." His hands were covered in cold sweat when he took the needle from her.

The guttural growl startled Charval. "You're doing fine," said Ralik. "Barely felt it."

"Who knew," said Charval with a flickering smile. "I should have been a trauma surgeon."

After two false starts he punctured skin and gradually pulled the needle through, then repeated the process over and over up the length of the wound. He weaved an effective suture, pulling the wounds' lips shut on Ralik's arm. Falindra watched until she felt satisfied that Potes could manage the stitches. One wound, then another, then one more, all preparation for slowly gathering confidence before he pierced sharp metal into the batarian's face.

"Well if it's going to be done, we might as well be quick about it," Muriel finally harrumphed. Her voice seemed to boom through the silence of the room. Charval's arms lurched; he cursed and thanked the ether that he had not begun dealing with the next wound while being startled. "Before one of the krogan arrive, and decide to give us all cracked skulls," she continued, then levelled her commanding stare on the asari responsible for recruiting them into this predicament. "Two patients. Don't suppose you thought to bring two needles?"

Falindra retrieved the second needle from her shirt pocket and held it up for the human's taking, giving it away without a word.

Muriel sauntered over toward Bols and hunkered down by his side. "I'm not here to coddle you so lay still. We'll get you fixed up faster if you don't squirm and don't complain. Understand?"

Bols propped his head up against the wall and managed to grunt. "Do it."

Muriel pulled her wiry blond hair behind her ears and began stitching wounds with stern poise. The batarian under her pretense of care kept his four eyes fixed on the sharp instrument that she fixed between her fingers. The tiny instrument glinted a sparkle of light and reminded Falindra that near anything might be used as a weapon; she saw that the same thought ran through Bols' mind, his muscles overcoming fatigue and pain, tense and ready to strike out if the succor turned to threat; and this, in turn, put Falindra on alert to respond if mutual hatred overcame the human and batarian.

Muriel leaned close, her face hovering a knife's length from the gaping wound in Bols' cheek. She never showed sympathy for her patient when she pushed the needle through. He winced and she made a dramatic gesture of clutching his scalp and pushing down, an emphasis on the importance of keeping still. "Stay like that," she commanded. No sympathy, but she applied first aid with deliberate precision. The provided care was incidentally gentle in a professional sort of way, but Falindra watched until satisfied that the second ministrations were correctly applied.

From the doorway Kenji waved a broad, cutting stroke through the air with his arm. "Somebody is coming." He mouthed the words, too afraid to shout the warning aloud and arouse the interloper's suspicions. A sheen of sweat glistened along his forehead. The room became a theatrical tableau of actors freezing on stage mid-scene. All faces locked toward the doorway.

All except for two. Gursk, whom no one else wanted or dared to speak with, had become fixated with the subtractions he practiced on Abacus. Falindra took the moment to assess how the civilians reacted during a moment of panic (and grew disappointed by the predictable paralysis that took hold of them). She heard the sole, approaching figure from beyond the room well before Kenji's warning. Even the Japanese man, in a calmer state, ought to have recognized that the footsteps were far too light for a krogan, or even a vorcha.

"What are you all doing," a voice asked.

Ten minutes into the future Charval Potes would desperately consider how to justify, obfuscate, or outright lie about his immediate reaction when the voice spoke and his body succumbed to a single, mighty convulsion of fright. A shrill yelp escaped him. Fear broke his brain. He dropped the needle and it landed perfectly in the centre of Ralik's bloodied forehead, sticking out like a crashed cartoon rocket.

"Did you all find something hidden in here?" It was Santina who came into the room with the frantic gait of a child desperately worried she'd been excluded from participating in some marvelous conspiracy, whether it was a secret game being played or a morsel of food spirited away from the kitchen. Not near five feet in height, so skinny that ribs and joints protruded from under the skin, gangly limbs arcing out in exaggerated directions, she reminded Falindra of an insect. She wiped a lock of dark hair away from her eyes to better survey the scene.

Ralik glared at Charval. "Don't let down your guard. She might be armed". He clenched a fist, and then relaxed it again.

The embarrassed salarian smiled and plucked the needle from his patient's face.

Santina gave a proper assessment of the adults' conspiracies – events held in secret not from the krogan or the vorcha, but from her. She understood quickly. "I can help." She made an attempt for the nearest batarian, but Kenji scooped her up before she got past. She squirmed. "Please. I want to help," she pleaded.

"You are a brave girl, but we've all the nurses we need," Kenji replied using the girl's native Spanish. His arm made a loop around her worming body. After ten years white-collar pursuits had rewarded Kenji with little in the way of muscle tone.

He was surprised by how quickly the fight against a squirming girl of nine risked his balance, by the limitless reservoirs of energy that gave strength to a determined child, energy he had not hope to muster or match. The aliens watched, a collection of statuettes trying to interpret the bizarre interaction play itself out. Kenji wondered how they interpreted what they saw. Did they think he was hurting her? Scolding? Playing? Maybe the vorcha thought it was a prelude to eating one's young? He felt the heated bloom of embarrassment that reddened his face. In other circumstances Kenji found public embarrassment to be the most unbearable torture. Life had changed since he left Earth. On this desolate moon of purposeless slavery his one mission had somehow become to keep the orphan girl safe, to be needed as her protector. He was powerless around the Dread Claw, but the batarians warranted fear. Having the means to react against this fear, no matter how incapacitated the source may be, he bowed to the instinct.

"Let me go," whined Santina, perplexed by the adult obstacle.

"What's the problem," asked both Falindra and Muriel in so many words, one in a lyrical, faltering Japanese, the other in the curling Irish notes of English.

After Kenji explained, both women welcomed the dark-haired slip of a girl to come watch. Reluctant, but defeated, Kenji released her into the room. She trotted across the floor, a smile exposing the crooked front tooth. She gave the fierce vorcha a wide berth and sprang into the centre of the fascinating triage. Muriel hunkered up beside Bols' shoulder to make room for the girl to sit and watch, but two aliens were much more interesting than one with a stern woman who reminded Santina of the cranky teacher who taught math in the third grade.

She hunkered up next to Charval, who still had no idea what to make of her arrival, turned to the injured Ralik at her feet, and surprised the room by asking in broken Batarian: "does it hurt?"

Within the next twenty minutes more onlookers arrived. They came in pairs, each person finding courage to explore with a cohort. The young human adults, Louis and Jocelyn, appeared, failing to hide the mutual sexual longing that ebbed like a current between recently parted hands. The asari from Armali, Caleen and her matron, Elayda, appeared. Finally the quarians, Trez'Kailer and Tasa'Nel, environmental suits freezing them in the forms of perpetual mysteries, appeared.

The silence in the conduits had piqued concern, then curiosity in each one of them.

It was a testament to the wondrous ineptitude of Dread Claw security that nearly every slave had now wandered into the room without any krogan yet making an appearance. That sort of luck was only reliable for so long. Falindra had risked this rendezvous on the calculation that Drau Zugo drew poor gambler's luck and was on sentry duty tonight. He was less likely than his brethren to seek out some hapless slave for the thrill of providing physical abuse, but apt to find Elayda and leer at her bosom. His favorite pastime while on security duty was to ask intellectual questions about asari religion and history and look to the matron's breasts for answers. Zugo might be oblivious to the absence of form in discarded sleeping bags, but he'd grow curious if Elayda proved hard to find.

Gursk was the nominal night patrol among the vorcha, which neatly alleviated any concern on that front; but that still left Hastings. His growing and unquenched resentment toward everything from Falindra, Kobayashi, and the krogan to cosmic laws made him a growing danger. He was armed with a keen perception for when to reap havoc.

Suspicious of Charval and his hidden pockets, she watched him apply the next suture. His long neck maneuvered around Santina, who kept poking her head in his way to examine the wounds.

"What's that scar from," she asked, pointing to a series of old discolored spots on the batarian's shoulder. They looked like a pallid constellation.

"Avenger. Human marine got me during a boarding action in Attican Beta," grumbled Ralik, his words slurred as his body retreated some steps from consciousness.

"And that one?"

He stirred a little to confirm which scar she pointed at. "Omni-blade. Bar fight on Omega."

"This one's my favorite." She pointed at the dotted outline of a wilted flower on his chest where a fragmentation grenade had hit.

Sye translated the conversation. He shared the absurdities of the topic because there was nothing else to translate and without serving in that role he feared he'd become insignificant: the outsider drell.

Jocelyn gave a tiny gasp as the words were delivered in English. "Tell her to stop," she demanded.

"Why," asked Santina. She and Sye simultaneously looked to the young woman for the answer.

"Because it's impolite," said Jocelyn, self-conscious of the attention she drew upon herself from others in the room, aware of Louis, his eyes inches away, examining her, which thrilled, tantalized, and made her anxious all at once. "I don't know… it's unfeminine."

When Muriel heard that answer she unleashed a hard, loud chortle. Then Louis smirked.

Jocelyn blushed. "Oh, shut up all of you. Study his body then. Give him a prostate exam for all I care."

Falindra had no idea how to join such repartee, but satisfied that Charval had the skill to complete first aid, even with Santina poking her head about and examining the process, Falindra stepped away from the scene. She approached the poorly-lit doorway, nodded to Kenji, and offered a regard in his human language, some neutral word like 'hey' or 'greetings'.

The Asian man's mouth formed the beginning of a response, but then his eyes widened with the impulse of fear and he moved away. Falindra didn't have to spend long speculating whether some poorly phrased wording on her part was the cause. The feral vorcha shadowed Falindra, feral, lips pulled back to reveal an exaggerated Halloween caricature of carnivorous teeth. The lot of captives still had no understanding for what deal had been brokered between the woman who had saved some of their lives and one of the savage taskmasters who often endangered them, but it left none of them any more comfortable with his presence.

She felt the vorcha's presence as the two of them suddenly became isolated at the side of the room where she monitored for Zugo. He stood taller than her, his limbs long and sinewy, the muscles defined. He was teeth and claws and smelled earthy, but somehow she felt comfortable in his company.

"Captain Foul."

"Yes,"

"You proper military, right?"

She thought over whether to confess the simple truth, even though the fact had already been laid bare by Drin. She studied the room: the salarian who stitched up Ralik while his cohort and a band of human offered overview suggestions and encouragement in a language he didn't understand; the human near the far wall who proficiently nursed Bols while her lover and the asari and quarians admired her proficiency.

"Yes," she finally answered the question. "Why do you ask?"

"Err, well me thought they taught first aid in fancy armies like you asari have. Wouldn't it have been easier to do this yourself? Rather than me rounding up people, me mean?"

Falindra suppressed a smile. "Providing first aid wasn't entirely the point, Gursk."

"Oh," he said, confused. "Should me make them stop?"

"No, everything's going fine." She saw that both conscripted nurses had nearly finished. Nobody needed reminding that it was unsafe to linger as a crowd any longer. They would disperse of their own accord soon enough.

"Grab Sye, please," she asked. "Let's go visit the professor."


	10. Chapter 10

Tasa'Nel helped clean the recreation room, throwing blood-stained gauze made from torn rags into dust bins, righting some of the furniture that had been turned over, and piling into a slightly-less-messy looking pile the broken furnishings that were beyond easy salvage.

The tension lifted from the gathered group once Falindra had taken the vorcha with her. Tasa found her body became less tense when she no longer feared a vorcha throwing an unexpected tantrum before it shred her breathing apparatus with its claws.

"Isn't she amazing," Tasa said. Trez'Kailer helped her with the self-appointed chores, his arms wrapped wide around a pile of debris as he took it to the refuse pile. He grunted non-committal agreement. "First saves everybody from the malfunctioning ice drill, now she gets everyone together to help the injured batarians. You have to admit, that's pretty amazing!"

The unmasked admiration plain in her voice made her feel childish. She was grateful for the topic of conversation to share. Somehow, even after all the time spent together since their capture, Trez made her self-conscious. He had arrived two weeks after her own capture, and proved quickly that he had no intentions of being the 'new person' victim when he caught one of the salarians stealing from her and successfully demanded the return of spare rations taken from the kitchen. He appointed himself her protector immediately after.

The worse disillusionment that comes with age is, all too naturally, that life does not unfold as youthful visions predict. The quarians were heroes among the galaxy, their fleet instrumental in defeating the Reapers. They had retaken their home world.

Even the geth were gone. Supposedly, the machines made peace with their creators before and fought alongside them in the battle to save Earth. Tasa was uncertain about those details. Few people knew all the facts from those violent, history shaking days; but some facts lay bare: the androids that nearly drove the quarians to extinction were themselves no more. Her people possessed a home world again. They had saved the galaxy. It was to be an era of jubilation and prosperity.

So why wasn't it? Her people had grown divided, many too settled into the traditions they had built during generations living aboard ships, Tasa among them. The Bellapay had been a home where she knew safety, its boundaries defined and limits known. Every corridor was an avenue and she knew every deck of the ship. Nothing of that life or the Pilgrimage that marked her rite of passage into her adulthood had prepared her for being suddenly transferred to an open plateau, a horrifyingly limitless expanse of mysterious animal sounds and random wind storms. That was where her wonderful new life was supposed to start. From machinist to crop farmer in twelve days: nine days for planetary acclamation and three days of class where an unfamiliar captain turned regional governor gave instructions on how to grow certain types of crops best suited to the area. The captain was quite proud of his deductions about these crops and the wisdom he was able to share. He had discovered in his ship's computer archives a history book on agriculture for the region. It contained everything the farmers needed to know. Three days with a naval captain reading from a history book and she was declared ready for a life she never intended.

Three months taught her about the exhaustions of outdoor labor. About soil erosion and unexpected drought and pests that burrowed underground where they ate roots and of pesticides that Citadel Space manufacturers charged heavy fees to export. After three months she became one of thousands of quarians who joined the unexpected 'Reverse Migration' back into space, trying to find a ship to call home once more.

Trying to survive the Attican Traverse by herself was far different than traveling through it among a fleet of thousands. One poorly booked passage and a minor course correction later led to slavery.

If Trez had not come along she'd surely have succumbed to despair by now. He looked out for her, and empathized. Despite their circumstances his confidence never seemed to waver and it became infectious. She lay against his chest at night and found refuge in the rhythm of his breathing. She craved to see him unmasked, glide her fingers across his skin. The only storybook element that had visited her life was the intrepid, heroic man who arrived, the only two members of their species, marooned together on the frontier. It was romantic, save that he only ever held her to share warmth. She'd watched the captives pair off among the humans , listened to their love-making at night from adjacent corridors and wished Trez might, while holding her, finally succumb to lust, wondered how he had not yet guessed her wish. She ignored the fact that stripping off their environmental suits might lead to their deaths.

"I don't think she's even afraid of the Dread Claw. You saw how she tells that one vorcha what to do. I bet she's unafraid of the krogan." Tasa was in a good mood, euphoric from the peculiar combination of assisting in a good deed and feeling like she was in the midst of succeeding in mischief.

She dropped two halves of a plastic chair on top of the pile, now standing waist high, and nudged her leg against the heap, pressing it against the wall.

"She's definitely unafraid," Trez responded. "I had to stop her from meddling when Bodix attacked the batarians.

"Really," said Tasa, astounded.

"Oh, yeah. I caught her marching toward the fight, about to throw her fists into the mix before I talked sense into her."

"Do you think Bodix would have killed her?"

Trez, mid-step toward a dining tray shattered on the floor, stopped and stood squarely facing her. "I think asari love to lead and love the rest of us to watch. When her self-aggrandizing backfires we'll reap the consequences."

"That's not true," Tasa said, disappointed with his cynicism.

"Oh. Did she ask if people wanted to help the batarians, if they were happy with that risk? What if the krogan decided to pay more attention to their prisoners than their drink this evening? It happens. Do you think they'd applaud our cooperation to see us all working together? How might your heroic asari have protected us then?"

"Shh! Trez! You shouldn't say things like that." She stuck out her chin in the direction of the two asari still in the room, standing near the unused bar.

''What," he responded drolly. "You think they've ever bothered learning to speak quarian in the first five hundred years of their lives?"

"Now you're being mean."

He became motionless. "You're right," he said, as if he'd been delivered epiphany. "One should never be uncivil." He shook himself just as quickly from the flash of reverie and went back to cleaning the room. "But my argument stands, believe that."

A salarian stepped past Tasa and headed toward the door before he stopped, turned around and smiled. He was the one who stitched up Ralik's face, Potes she recalled. He kept smiling and said, "I'm going to find Falindra," and if Tasa spoke salarian at all, then the words might not have sounded like squeaky gibberish. He left the room.

The access shaft that led down was littered with debris. Air intake vents had created a tide of invisible current, soft breezes that, over several years, gathered detritus – fecal matter of alien vermin, the broken odds and ends of discarded tools, and dust balls – in every crevice; but these were not obstacles compared to the broken piping that hung like wrathful stalactites from the sundered ceiling, or the larger discarded items littering the floor, including the skeletal remains of a murder victim, his body so carelessly discarded that only the extreme indifference of the Dread Claw explained the lack of official discovery.

They walked in single file with Gursk leading and Sye taking up the rear. Falindra pretended that they had deliberately chosen their order so that if they came across a krogan or another vorcha they might inconspicuously appear to be a guard and freeman escorting a slave between them. In truth, their order was happenstance. Gursk was content clearing a path by punching and kicking and head-butting any rubbish in his way (or, for that matter, rubbish not in his way but which made good sport. Sye tripped, bashed his shins, and clunked his head too frequently to keep pace.

The noise of Sye's groaned complaints at repeated pain and inevitable bruises kept them company. Each scrape became more melodramatic, each yelp a display of his manly willingness to endure pain.

It made him comical rather than admirable, but Falindra suppressed any urge to laugh or berate him for making unnecessary noise for fear of wounding his ego. Those sorts of bruises were always far worse and didn't always promise to heal. She'd yet to figure out why he followed her so readily and the mystery left her unsettled. Until she gleaned the answer she'd maintain the civil façade of intrigue.

She felt awkward being placed in positions of leadership. Commanding a small team of specialists was easy. She knew the inner workings and quirks of the Nefrane's port gun batteries better than nearly anyone. That expertise provided her the confidence to instruct other gunnery crew on their duties. Plus, in small teams an informality and kinship overrode the discomfort of hierarchy, of relationships always tinged with the undertone of authority-meets-subordinate. The navy was a poor profession for someone uncomfortable with hierarchies. It was her secret shame that serving at the rank of lieutenant commander had already started revealing those weaknesses, which would only become more pronounced with each promotion. Joining the Serrice Guard had been as much about minimizing her weaknesses as making use of her strengths.

Puzzling through this conundrum, surprised by being mentally mugged by bad memories the way such memories are wont to appear from the dark places where they hide and never entirely die, the truth behind the aid being given by her two companions was beyond her power to fully understand.

For Gursk the answer was equally impossible to put into words. If the other vorcha or the krogan were half as competent as they bragged they'd still be unequal to Captain Foul who never bragged at all. He recognized the calculated measure in each of her movements, no wasted energy or casual step, the patterns of a vigilant predator. He knew her mind was at work on plans even if he lacked the insight to guess what they were, like the way she engineered for the other slaves to nurse the injured batarians when it was within her power to provide the aid herself. That would have been the easier choice and the safer one. She might have collected a personal debt instead of letting Muriel and Charval bank those future favors.

It wasn't recognizing her talent that won his companionship. That was owed to something far simpler and still beyond his means to understand. She never called him stupid. Her face never displayed the contemptuous sneer that the krogan always made a point to share. Disdain made worse when a companion made such a weak effort to disguise it while asking for favors. No matter how important the request, the krogan, or even his fellow vorcha, never found the tact to hide their contempt. The expressions among the slaves were no better. Even when he beat on them the least among all of the vorcha, even as he kept watch for them moments ago, the humans and salarians always left the hatred and revulsion for him exposed on their faces. Captain Foul was different; only Mechano-Man came close, but he was no warrior. He did not possess the words to articulate the respect she showed him that he'd never before received, yet he found the feeling addictive, comforting. She knew his weakness, his sole fear, and still treated him with respect. The loyalty he felt toward her was unparalleled to anything in his past. He felt no compunction about betraying the Dread Claw as a consequence of this simple change of fealty.

For Sye, the reason he followed was simple. Despite the pain it seemed to entail and the unacknowledged admiration for how he braved them, he still held true to the simplest of maxims to live by: when a beautiful, fascinating woman who knows how to kill you ten different ways asks for your company, there is one answer that is correct and another that makes you a candidate for psychiatric institutionalization. He knew the correct answer.

They formed a conspirators' triangle (Falindra and Sye stood, Drin sat on his bar stool), sipping tea while they plotted sabotage and mayhem. Gursk tinkered with a collection of tools laid across the professor's work bench, reorganizing them in a row from smallest and to largest, gurgling glee at his organizational skills and grunting half-hearted confirmations that he listened to the conversation. The room felt cramped with four people in it. Low hanging pipes along the ceiling and the work station and power monitoring systems against the wall left little room for people to find comfort. Falindra stole a glance at her handiwork on one of the pressure pipes and the inconspicuous hole above it that she had made into the ceiling. The she began:

"I promised you that when I escaped, I'd be taking the slaves with me." Drin nodded grimly. "So it's time to get everyone ready," she said succinctly.

"Escape?" said Sye. "We had plans on escaping? Did I know about this? Did I share in this grand delusion?"

"It's happening," she said, quiet but somehow definitive.

"No offense against your grand designs, but the Dread Claw is likely to object. Strenuously. It'd be a shame seeing you perforated with bullets when I'd gotten so fond of your presence." He gently wrapped his hand around her arm. "Krogan shotguns have a way of ruining other people's fun."

Falindra firmly removed his hand. "Sye, I am escaping. I've planned to escape since I arrived. I know exactly what method I'll use, which tools I'll need. If I'm going to help all the slaves escape, though, then you're needed. That's why I risked inviting you here. You're the only person who knows my intentions besides Drin and Gursk because you're the only one who can organize and convince all the slaves to hustle where they need to be when, as you say, krogan shotguns are brought to bear. It's up to you whether to walk away, maybe report us. You're no slave, strictly speaking," she emphasized the last part. "The krogan are sure to consider you a finer friend, worthy of their esteem, for foiling an escape attempt."

They both knew the falsity of that statement. Whatever agreement that Sye once brokered to gain residence among the pirates had long turned to dust. In another month his life expectancy would be no better a gamble than any of the captives.

"Well since you need someone heroic, I certainly can't refuse; but I think you'll owe me a kiss for my gallantry." He gave his best grin, the one that wooed the daughters of prime ministers and generals, the same one that preceded the cause of arrest warrants on five different worlds, but helped get two warrants rescinded. "And since I'm likely to die, I'll want payment in advance."

He hardly expected Falindra to throw her arms around his head and press her body against him in a burst of pornographic lust (though he'd offer no objections in such an unlikely event). It was enough to watch the flicker of confusion on her brow, the slight blush. That was his nectar.

"Are your hormones hardwired to your tongue," snapped Drin.

"It's possible," said Sye and stared into an invisible point as though the question demanded consideration.

Falindra raised her arm between the two men and they both fell silent, bringing an end to the squabble before it evolved into a genuine fight. For all of Sye's nonchalance or the professor's masked face, she sensed that their brief exchange carried the barbs of a mutual dislike wanting for the chance to catch fire. She didn't understand it. They were together for an agreed common cause, the matter urgent, yet her two allies immediately fell to bickering. It never happened among a squad of the Serrice Guard.

"Gursk," she said over her shoulder toward the corner of the room where he lurked. "Please join us. I need you to be involved. I'll be counting on you to help these two out."

"Huh," he responded, plopping down the wrench in his hand before he sauntered over. Nobody ever needed him before. Sure, Drau Gorba shouted orders and Skeb always tried telling him what to do – usually amidst threats that he'd die if either one felt displeased by the effectiveness of his subservience – but they never needed him.

Gursk swiped his tongue along his upper gum line and chanced upon an unfinished morsel of desiccated meat. He decided this was a good omen. He came into their circled and stood next to Falindra, skin brushing hers. Sye suppressed a spasm of jealousy.

"First," she began. "Do you have that omni-tool ready for me? If not, this will be a short briefing."

Drin lowered himself onto the floor and scurried under the workbench. He brushed aside two metal storage boxes and retrieved the Elkoss Combine produced device. He stood upright, grunting with the stiffness in his back, and proffered the device to Falindra. "It's a Cipher V model. It lacks the sophistication of the designs you're surely used to employing and it has seen some ware."

She snapped the magnetic clasps around her forearm and clicked on the power. The omni-tool hummed to life, producing the signature holographic amber glow that sheathed her hand and lower arm. Some of the distinctive colorations that represented soft-pressure commands flickered for several seconds before manifesting a clear resolution.

"I have managed to program most of the modifications you wanted: remote connection commands, parallel processors. It's not perfect. Zugo allowed several corruptive files to embed themselves in the core programming. I've been unable to scrub the memory of his considerable collection of hanar pornography. So you'll be suffering with that for a while yet"

Sye burst into peals of laughter. "I have a new level of respect for that demented krogan. I haven't seen hanar porn since I left Kahje. That's a lot of anti-gravity blubber to keep in focus."

He wiped a tear that managed to sneak past both sets of eyelids from his right eye, and then noticed that none of his cohorts shared in his amusement. Worse, it seemed to exasperate the grim faces they were so intent on wearing. Apparently, humor was an insult to their dour moods. "If the three of you don't see the funny, you've got defective brains."

Gursk, who secretly worried that he suffered from just such an ailment, offered a long-delayed laughter to undermine Sye's accusation.

"Please…," said Falindra. Her patience wore out fast from diversions during a mission briefing. "The Dread Claw is going to object to escape attempts and if we don't plan, those objections will translate into corpses, so let's not be distracted by our perversions."

Sye muttered something about his perversions being his best qualities, but complied.

Later, she'd wonder why, after fostering camaraderie among the other prisoners, she became so quick to discourage it when she found herself involved. In the recreation room she had gathered everyone, then reduced herself to a detached monitor. Here, Sye welcomed laughter from her. Laughter is the easiest of intimacies and she scoffed at it because her mind set itself to mission mode. Later, always too late, the introspection kicked in and she wondered about these things.

"Professor, I'm going to start a fight in the processing room. Once that happens you need to get to the security room and disable the power."

"How is losing power possibly going to help us escape? Unless you want to seize control of the building, I'd think power might be rather helpful for any escape route."

"This room will remain operational."

"Then the krogan will simply scramble in there, kill anyone they find, and retake control." The volus attempted to understand her schemes. For all his technical brilliance, her strategy was elusive, which unnerved him.

Falindra waited. She had decided that, in case one of the three men proved unworthy of the trust of welcoming them into this plot, her intentions need not be provided in detail. While the professor bemoaned the futility of cutting power, she soaked in the ambience. The dim of one angled ceiling light that provided an appropriately shadowy setting. The mechanical coughing of environmental systems haunted by broken cogs and poor maintenance. She listened for creaking metal floorboards beyond the room, watched for beams of flashlight, sniffed for suspicious odors coming from the ventilation.

She learned that on the Nefrane, a strange smell in the air circulation often foreshadowed growing danger: a fire on another level; toxins leaked into the air filtration. Keeping yourself constantly attuned to those small sensations helped prevent calamity.

"…Besides," concluded the professor, reaching the end of his list of critical objections. "There's a door of three inch thick hardened steel we have to bypass."

"Try flirting with one of the krogan until he volunteers the security codes," suggested Sye. "It seems like Drau Zugo has an experimental mind. Maybe he'll enjoy your sexual wiles. Volus do have wiles, don't they?"

"Stop thinking about pornography, you insufferable scoundrel." Drin waved a stern, chubby finger that intimidated with a surprising force of will.

"Gursk can get you past the door, right Gursk?" Falindra ignored the irrelevant parts of the conversation.

The vorcha nodded agreeably. "Me needed to open door." He rolled his tongue along the upper gum line again and was disappointed not to discover any further morsels of food.

"Okay, but after that I actually have to program the computer to cease power distribution. That might take a while."

"Won't blowing up the computer do the job?" she asked.

"Ah, the subtle artistry of crude destruction. Perfect stratagem. And how might I achieve such a feat?"

Falindra hunkered down and reached for her shoe lace. Her fingers worked free one of the few tips remaining. She was running low of utilities at hand and was now giving away the only weapon in her possession. The omni-tool now strapped around her arm made up for it partially, but she chose not to share with the three men that without a biotic implant – or a pistol at the very least – she did not believe their success was guaranteed. Not even slightly.

She stood up and held out her hand until Drin took the lace tip from her. He held it close to his eyes and made quizzical sounds.

"It's a micro grenade."

He snapped his hand away, choking through a surge of panic, mortified that he'd held the grenade so near his head. A vague animal fear struck him that the weapon, with fiendish sentience, might sense the closeness of his face and choose to go off.

"You wear a grenade?" He shouted in disbelief. The others winced as his voice carried.

"It's a useful emergency tool to have on hand."

"Screw drivers are tools. Bombs are not."

"Please don't get agitated," Falindra said. "I promise you that it's safe. It's a micro-grenade; it's nearly harmless – just enough explosive to do the job. Or keep it as an emergency weapon if you are able to program the power shut down. You might need it to get through a door if Gursk can't bypass the locks."

Drin wobbled and his cohorts half expected his legs to buckle and for him to land on his large rump. Somehow, he found steel in those legs.

He said: "Falindra, having dedicated my academic career to the study of natural sciences, I won't pretend to have a mastery of the military philosophies you surely possess; but I do not believe there has yet been invented a category of ordinance to which the title 'nearly harmless' applies. I've watched several war documentaries and not once in any of them do I recall a re-enactment where sergeants ordered their squads to lob 'nearly harmless' grenades at the enemy.

Sye clapped his hands together once in splendid appreciation. "You do enjoy letting your mind spin itself into a good rant, professor."

Drin pointed his imposing finger up at the drell outlaw again, warning against interruption. The round and comical little figure of a man refused to be deterred when an argument needed to be made. When his authoritative finger was done quelling Sye, it pointed toward Gursk emphatically. "The woman concerned about a vorcha's mental stability advises about the benefits of wearing explosive fashion accessories."

She never considered herself a great leader, thought she'd been lucky to have exceptional crewmen under her command. She never before faced such hostile scepticism while issuing orders and was uncertain how to respond. She did know that it required a fast response before his anxiety became contagious.

Falindra knelt down until her face was on even level with his. "You wanted this. You made me swear not to abandon the captives when I made my escape. I'm trying to fulfil that promise. Did you think moving twenty plus civilians past armed overseers was going to be done without coordination?

She rested a hand on his sloping shoulder. "I need help. Unless you've discovered how to make teleportation a reality."

He sighed. "I've worked on theories." He looked solemnly up at the other two men, then back at her. "I just never realized….. I'd hate for people to get hurt. I just want to be back at the university, back at work."

A horrible pang of guilt stabbed Falindra in the gut. She straightened up to her full height and tried to suppress the feeling, but without much success. She still had to tell Drin Haylar that he'd never be returning to his old life, that he'd stumbled into internecine conspiracies and that, if he was very lucky, he might avoid an assassin's bullet. Now was about the worst time to explain that his life was ruined. Asking him to risk his life under false pretenses lacked honor. It was unjust and she had to tell him. She was surprised that the choice affected her so greatly. The two had known each other a few weeks. They sipped tea together. There'd been no love making or soulful confessions. She hadn't counted on imprisonment, like military service, building strong personal bonds. She silently prayed he'd forgive her previous deceit.

"You can't go back to your old life, professor. That won't happen even if we get out of here. Not for the foreseeable future." Her lips became thin lines on her face.

"What are you talking about? Even if I'm not reinstated at Ten-Clan there are scores of universities that would bid to have me." His protest felt weak. He knew by the firmness of her voice that this argument was irrelevant. She had a horrible revelation to divulge like some wicked mythical figure spewing bleak prophecy. "What haven't you told me?"

Sye stepped out of their huddle, seeking invisibility.

"You're the second reason I came here," said Falindra. "You said yourself that it was harsh for the Academy to fire you. Your research is brilliant, on the precipice of great discovery. Except that the research you wanted funded next was going to uncover some enormous conspiracies."

"What in the universe are you talking about?"

"Industrial strength plasma batteries. You wanted to inventory and analyze hundreds of them to demonstrate that the applications of your proposed projects might be superior."

"And?" He was half incredulous, half grief-stricken.

She hated telling him this. "Industrial plasma batteries, like the ones used on helium-3 extractors and military cruisers. You have no idea how many were reported destroyed or missing following the Reaper War. How many of those were false reports? Intelligence communities have nightmares about that sort of thing. But hardware like that isn't the same as hiding black market Red Sand. Someone of your thoroughness and expertise is going to notice inconsistencies in reports, is going to detect anomalous energy readings."

"This is preposterous. And irrelevant. I don't want to hear your conspiracy fantasies. Like I said, if Ten-Clan won't take me back I'll find a school on Irune. Or maybe Palaven."

The heat bloomed across Falindra's face. She hated this, was embarrassed to have the discussion in front of others. "Believe me, it's happened. Who do you think put those helium-3 extractors up there for the Dread Claw to guard? Anyone who has the resources to organize that has the means to make friends with university deans and presidents. You're not going back to academia, professor. I'm deeply sorry, but you're not."

His breathing apparatus made horrid rasping sounds as it struggled to hold in the anger he vented. "You knew the whole time we sipped tea and you talked about rescuing us?"

She nodded. She tried holding his gaze and failed.

"Me protect you after we leave world if you like." Gursk offered. The conversation was beyond his grasp, but he knew where he might be helpful and was delighted to try.

"You're screwed," said Sye. "Not but because of what she said. Just because of Gursk."

"Me kill anyone trying to kill Mechano-Man."

Falindra was grateful for the presence of the other two, as much as it added to her shame seconds before. The current of anger in the air dissipated, even if there was the hidden promise that the discussion might continue at a later time.

"Exactly," she said. "Once I draw the Dread Claw into the processing room you two will enter the security room, disable the power transfer systems, then leave through the front air hatch and make your way toward the launch pad to meet with the others." She tried sounding professional. Back to the mission briefing. But a lump in her throat made her voice warble. She paused, then started again. "Sye, once you see the lights lose power you have to herd all the slaves quickly toward the eastern air hatch. One of the wheeled transports will be waiting outside."

"How?" he said.

She didn't want to explain how during her excursion outside, after Gursk had led her toward the vehicle platform, she had tampered with one ATV's computer, had embedded control commands in its auto navigational programs. "It will be there. Signal my omni-tool when you have everyone on board, then head east for twenty seconds. Its sensor system is going to cut out so you'll be driving on visuals after that. Turn north toward the launch pad and get everyone onto Hastings' ship."

Sye nodded.

"You need to be stern, Sye. When the building loses power and people start hearing guns, there's going to be a lot of fear. People won't be rational, which means they'll be receptive to someone showing strength and giving them order; but if you waver or let them start to panic, we'll have a disaster, so keep herding them. Tell them they're escaping, but don't give details."

"I've got plenty of confidence in you." Sye the Cordial raised one more concern. "But two dozen armed and homicidal pirates seem like bad odds. How are you going to deal with all the krogan?"

"Give it a couple days and there'll hardly be any," she replied knowingly.

Falindra left with Sye by her side. It took only mild prodding to convince her that leaving their clandestine meeting as a pair was safer than departing individually. If a wandering krogan or vorcha stumbled upon them and became suspicious about their late night wanderings, the easiest cover story, much to his delight, was that they were lovers who hungered for a private, carnal moment, and stole away to an unused room for shared gratification. Unbeknownst to Falindra, he had shared his romantic fantasies about her with enough of the captives and captors both to lend weighted plausibility to the rouse.

Unfortunately for Sye Videl, proud libertine and connoisseur of debauchery, the asari by his side was completely disinterested in any smooth talk he offered. She remained absorbed in her contemplations.

They walked up the access corridor ramp toward the slaves' makeshift barracks in the old corridors. Her eyes stared into the riddles of imaginary focal points ahead, never once reciprocating the shared glances he tried to steal. A couple times she switched her attention and he thought her focus finally fell to him, but she invariably muttered words about this distance from the reclamation room to processing, the paces along the secondary corridor, or time, in seconds, it took to ascent ventral access.

He liked the shape of her lips when she talked to herself and the way her jawbone elongated her cheeks.

She thrust an arm in front of him, a bullet blur that nearly made him yelp in surprise. He stood still at her bidding near the upper mouth of the tunnel. Falindra stepped forward and around the corner the way a predator rounds about its trapped quarry, sniffing for signs on whether a crippling wound is real or a feint. She held one firmly near her leg, knuckles flexed forward in preparation for a martial strike.

"Hello Charval," she said and Sye saw the salarian come into view from around the corner.

He guffawed and stared at his hands, thumbs nervously twining. For his recent efforts as a nurse Charval Potes was on the verge of being rewarded with a coma. Sye didn't understand why Falindra acted like a creature threatened, but he hoped that the salarian possessed conversational skills that impressed her more than his own.

"I was looking for you," said Charval.

"Were you?" Falindra responded cryptically. She had been ruminating about the figures who fit into the plot she investigated. The Dread Claw was not the true threat. For all their viciousness and temerity, they were a pirate group with an illegal ice mining operation, hardly unheard of in the Terminus. They lacked the resources to operate a helium-3 facility; they were agents of someone else. How much had Walbeck known when he betrayed his Alliance oaths and double cross her? Did he serve some secret master or was he the puppeteer? She doubted the latter was possible; he was too snivelling, too scared. What about the non-slaves that were laid up in the habitat like stranded hobos? Could someone like Hastings or one of the batarians be an undisclosed ally to something more sinister? Maybe the quarians? She was going through a mental checklist of suspicious individuals when the salarian with the deft hands and hidden pockets came upon them.

"I wanted to thank you," said Charval, still uncomfortable with the moment, with his broken use of the asari language. His gratitude came forth like a confession.

"For?"

"Convincing us to help the batarians." He said the next words with emphasis in case they were not believed. "It felt good you know. For the first time in forever I didn't feel… powerless… like I'm just waiting to see where the universe dumps me next."

"And you came here to tell me?" she asked, and since these are not the usual words to express 'you are welcome' Charval sensed for the first time that something might not be right, worrying he'd caused offense.

"You weren't at your sleeping mat. Everyone knows you like having tea with the volus. I figured it was the best place to find you."

"Did you?" Her voice grew ominous.

"Uh, yes. Sorry, was the tea a secret?"

Sye stepped in and put into practice his greatest skill: conversation. He thanked Charval for taking the time to thank the triage organizer, quipped that the salarian obviously looked for any pretext to admire her beauty. Falindra blushed, embarrassed and angry, but it was the sort of anger that took the fight out of her. He expressed wonder at the precision Charval displayed while stitching Ralik's wounds, then pontificated at length about the salarian's higher destiny as a brave doctor serving desperate townsfolk on some pastoral frontier world where a voluptuous salarian princess awaited him (salarian lack of romantic concepts not withstanding).

By the time he finished, his audience was spent and they parted ways, the asari commando mollified, if for the moment, and Charval left euphoric with a sense of accomplishment and success that had too long evaded him.

After Potes left their company, Sye and Falindra continued to their makeshift beds. He speculated how quickly she'd lose the good will she had won from the prisoners if she planned to maim every person she helped. Before they went their separate ways, Sye took her wrist in his hand.

"One thing has become abundantly clear, sweetie: you need me."

She blinked and offered no response; but at least he had her attention.


	11. Chapter 11

Falindra had been right when she predicted that it would only take a couple of days before the slaves found that the habitat had been left guarded by a mere handful of their task masters. It had come after a particularly grueling day processing ice. The workers were worked to exhaustion, forced to break stellar ice into manageable fragments at a rate that caused a few of the humans to grumble that some new market quota had been set. They grumbled in the morning. By afternoon their energy was too spent; they could mutter under their breaths or work, not both. Only the failure of completing one of those two brought physical punishment and the complainers chose wisely which to abandon. They intended to sleep soundly that night.

Falindra guessed quickly why they'd been ordered to work so hard. The Dread Claw planned to leave few guards behind come evening.

For all his spats of cruelty and for all his disinterest in the life-spans of his captives, Drau Bodix was no bully. He was the alpha male of a predator pack. Allowing his recent defeat to remain unanswered was an unthinkable shame. He'd doubtlessly obsessed over revenge since it happened, allowing only enough time to elapse for healing wounds before he undertook the next excursion against whatever rival gang on the moon's surface had won his hatred.

Tiring out the workers was his way of pacifying them while he was away. He planned for an extended time raid that might last into the next day.

After the evening meal, instead of returning to the dwelling corridors with the other captives, she darted past the old science lab and into the observation cubicle above it. From there she had a small vantage point toward the second level entry ramp. She watched as Drau Bodix led his band of malcontents toward the shuttle pad, each of them studded with assault rifles, back-up pieces, armor, bandoliers, spare clips, and motor-powered blades. Mar with his facial tattoo and Zugo, sans-porn, served as lieutenants among the krogan.

Skeb snarled orders at the vorcha contingent. There was hissing and growling and biting at air as they motivated themselves for the ensuing havoc. The blistery skinned vorcha, Trelg, swabbed dark blue ichor along the blade of a primitive battle-axe. He held the single blade close to his face, inspecting the layer of poison with the gleeful anticipation of savagery.

Nine krogan stood beside the exit to the shuttle pad, preparing to lay siege against their neighbor. Eight vorcha accompanied them. When the weapons check was completed, Mar struck the wall panel that lifted the electronic doors and the assault force stormed outside toward the two planetary shuttles.

A solitary krogan, Drau Loze, closed the door after them, standing in an emptied room.

Falindra calculated that only three krogan and four vorcha had been left behind, chief among them being the constant taskmaster, Drau Gorba, and the fiendish grinning Kryts.

She planned to give Bodix's troop three hours before starting her own wave of havoc.

Nobody showed surprise when they saw her jogging her usual route from the processing room, through the extension hall and down the north tunnel to the reclamation room, then along the south tunnel back to the processing room. It was her usual circuit. In the past, some of the tired slaves, lounging about their makeshift cots that webbed the tunnels may have given her scurrilous glares. They either resented the energy she still possessed after a day's labor, or thought her compulsion for exercise was a neurosis in the midst of what their lives had become. After her leadership in the recreation room their attitudes had changed. Vallon Corla, once among her greatest critics, offered a wide, warming smile, the way only large salarian mouths can, as she passed him by in the north tunnel. In the south tunnel the humans, for all their baffling ways, offered a variety of waves and hand signals: Jocelyn gave a thumb's up, Kenji waved with his fingers pressed against one another while Muriel waved with her fingers spread wide and Lonwabo simply tilted his finger in Falindra's direction. These signals, without uniformity, all indicated approval.

Nobody who acknowledged her suspected that this was her final inspection. She mentally catalogued every detail of the layout and people. Broken rebar still hung from the ceiling in the central tunnel and storage room. Ceiling lights fluttered in the south tunnel. Nothing stood on the floor directly above Drin's operations room in the sub-level. The passage ways were strewn with rubble, either pieces of the structure that had broken-off, or garbage that the Dread Claw and slaves had allowed to accumulate in small piles. After three weeks of daily jogs and nightly reconnoitering she had memorized every interruption along her routes, every jutting corner of floor panel. Memorization was not as good as the instinct she developed for the Nefrane's access ways, but she was confident that the fight would not be lost because of her tripping during the frenzy of battle.

Satisfied with the setting, she turned her final concerns toward specific people. There were three classes of people living in the habitat. The Dread Claw filled the role of a disturbing and particularly degenerate form of social elite. Captive laborers were synonymously slaves languishing at the bottom of the social spectrum. In between existed the nebulous caste of hangers-on whom the krogan marginally recognized as associates. Most of these 'friends' had grown to realize that the longer they remained the more likely their lives would become forfeit to the schemes and moods of their krogan hosts, but Falindra knew that such a predicament did not translate into them being trustworthy.

Sye was the probable exception, although she hadn't yet entirely made up her mind about the cad. Two had died during the ice drill accident. Hastings and his crew were squarely categorized as enemies and she already had a plan for immobilizing them. There were still two salarians who had been rogue merchants, but she estimated they would likely hide when the fighting started. Even if they dared get involved, any obstacle they presented was a minor worry compared to the krogan and vorcha. The last freeman of this strange middle-class was Trez'Kailer. His nimble quarian frame and quiet disposition belied steady, dauntless nerves. He kept his calm when an ice storm riddled people with shrapnel in the processing room. He never buckled or reacted on adrenaline and fear when the krogan were in foul moods. She didn't trust that sort of restraint in a person pretending to be a luckless civilian.

Unfortunately, after her third lap she had not yet seen him. Even though he might be in any one of a dozen nooks or crawl spaces, it was getting to the hour when people were lounging in shared sleeping quarters, playing makeshift games of chance using debris for tokens, and readying for bed. His unexplained absence unnerved her.

She noted that Hastings and his crew were in their glorified clubhouse in cargo room one. She allowed her lap to drift wide, made a quick scan of the room, and saw that all five members of the cohort were inside, laughing at crude jokes and getting drunk off a spacers' recipe for moonshine.

When she came into the shadows of the south tunnel again she saw Charval Potes and the little girl Santina chatting near the intersecting access tunnel. Snippets of their conversation drifted: his compliments on her courageous nursing efforts earlier in the evening; her express wish that someone might next suffer a brain injury (nothing too serious) so that she might practice her surgical skills. They spoke salarian, slow enough for the young girl practicing the language. They both turned their heads at once when Falindra stopped jogging to speak with them. It was a hard guess which of the two had been made skinnier by near-starvation. When she asked for a moment to speak with Charval alone, Santina gave the sour face of a precocious child who believes she understands the themes of adult conversations she's so often excluded from joining.

When the girl had withdrawn far enough back toward the cargo holds Falindra returned her full attention to the Charval Potes. His body resembled an upright worm with four extremities and an over-sized head. Creases around his eyes gave the impression of a kindly man who worried too much. Yet the first thing Talere had warned her about when joining the Serrice Guard was that the enemies she'd face would not always be obvious. The navy had traditions dating back thousands of years and each crewman, from admiral to petty officer, proudly knew the histories of the units in which they were stationed and the ships on which they served. They were responsible for legacies. With the exception of pirates and smugglers (and Reapers), their enemies likely had similar sentiments. How could they not? Enemy combatants of the Serrice Guard were entirely different. They might be a rival state's Special Forces or elite army division, sure, but were just as likely to be the pirates and smugglers; they were often slavers and spies, assassins and saboteurs, crime lords and psychotics. Those types of enemies rarely saluted or bothered with inconveniences like honor. Charval Potes might look unimpressive, but he had those secret pockets and nimble hands. He displayed sufficient technical skills for Drin Haylar to consider him a credible assistant and his skills might be far superior than he revealed. He had come snooping after her in the sub-level under the pretense of thanking her.

She didn't feel safe around his mysteries. Given the large operations that the Dread Claw was protecting, she had to consider that their employers kept a liaison onsite, someone who kept his identity a secret. Charval was a candidate. If he didn't assuage those concerns in the next conversation, she'd have to take severe precautions, ones possibly fatal to his health. She wasn't about to have the vulnerability of such a large question mark able to foil the escape.

"How are you doing," he asked conversationally. "Feeling exercised?"

She ignored the pleasantries. "When you found me earlier I had the impression you wanted to say more." She waited, gauging his response, and reached out to grab his hand.

"Um, no, not really." His feet shifted about while he fumbled through a few words. "Just thanks again." He stared down at where their hands touched.

"Don't thank me. I was impressed with your nursing skills. You're quite adept with your hands." Her grip tightened as if to emphasize the body part that earned her praise. The pressure she applied dispelled any notion Charval might have held that her overtures were friendly.

He grumbled an 'ouch' as she squeezed, looked up and saw a dangerous undercurrent in her eyes, heard it in her tone. He grew nervous, shifting his feet again, and tried to extricate his hand while still maintaining the pretense of two acquaintances enjoying casual conversation.

"What did you do before you got captured by the krogan?"

"What did I do?"

"Yes. Your job?" She put a bullet in each word.

"Why do you care about my job?" He became defensive. A surprise hint of temper overshadowed the meek persona.

"I'm curious…."

"I was a courier, if you must know," he confessed.

He was an even mix of fear and resentment. The former was understandable, but the latter was unexpected.

"Really, couriers don't usually know how to fix things, or possess the practiced hands you have. Did you have to juggle parcels?"

He recoiled from the sarcasm. "Well, I was cooling unit technician for my last job. I guess I picked up some skills."

"A technician. Really? Well why does a repairman need these," she accused. Falindra dug her thumb into a salarian pressure point in the palm of his hand. Charval yelped from the shock of pain. She twisted his wrist until his hand was palm-up and yanked his sleeve back, exposing two hidden pockets that had been expertly sewn in.

"Let go, let go!"

She released some of the pressure, but stepped closer, ready to throw him to the ground in an instant if necessary.

"I'm an illusionist, dammit. You happy? I am an illusionist. That's what I am."

"A what?" Falindra was baffled. The answer seemed so out of place that it refused to register. She wondered if this was a code, some veteran spy slang she'd yet to be educated about during her initial Serrice Guard training.

"An illusionist. A damn illusionist! Understand? An invoker. A magician." He screamed. Yes, I was a technician. A shitty technician. I was so bad I got fired from a conscripted job required for war reconstruction. That's how shitty a technician I was, which is fine because I never wanted to be one."

Falindra had no time to process the information that came with his outburst before he followed it up with the most unexpected and likely worst possible reaction. His face scrunched, eyes blinked shut, and his long, thin mouth quivered. Then he burst out crying. Huge sobs. Gales.

Having one's life brought to ruin on a desolate moon, its value measured in the effort a body can produce in exhaustive labor before it's all spent, lost to friends and family, it led to every slave finding need to cry. The tears usually came in the evening, in the privacy of one's pillow, or maybe a stolen moment in an unused conduit junction. Rarely, between circumstantial lovers after their union climaxed. But it had been a long time since Falindra watched someone share such emotion with her.

She had accidentally struck his vulnerable point, not one she'd calculated on: that his life was wasting away. In his despair he'd already forgotten her cruelty; his head fell onto her shoulder.

Guilt swept through her. She'd been provided examples of bizarre mission outcomes when she joined the Serrice Guard, illumination for the unorthodox roles they often donned. Having a man sob on her shoulder, wet tears and alien snot soaking through her shirt, the craving of emotional comfort… somehow none of this was referenced in commando training. He was supposed to be a wicked, deceitful contact of the Dread Claw's benefactors. She was supposed to interrogate him, apply rhetoric and cleverness until he stumbled over his words and revealed his nature. Then, after some prodding, some inquisitorial psychology, he'd confess his secrets. It seemed entirely indecent of him to deviate from script.

Yet, she pitied him. She didn't know what else to do but put her arms around his thin frame and let him cry.

The shadowed silhouette of a much taller, broader figure came from the far end of the tunnel, one of the humans. Lonwabo Mbatha approached, saw the two of them, and in broken salarian said: "is he alright? What happened?" What Falindra heard, however, was 'what did you do to him'. She felt ashamed and could only think to pat Charval's head.

She wondered if this was a test, whether she'd have failed commando training. She might have hoped otherwise, but Charval's overwhelming misery affected her and there was no use pretending indifference. Worse, it was Lonwabo Mbatha, who looked upon them, realized that he did not need to intervene in some fight for scraps of food, and so turned and left. He was not unsympathetic, simply stoic. Such misery lived and loomed like a ghostly cloud that bound together every last inhabitant of the habitat. It took turns possessing each one of them and sooner or later Mbatha's turn would come again.

Falindra held no doubts about her resolve to rescue every one of the slaves during the course of her escape; she was honor-bound. Other Special Forces units might consider the habitat's unwilling residents as inevitable casualties for the sake of acquiring crucial intelligence. For the Serrice Guard, such presumptions were anathema. The millennia of existence gave the unit an unexpected perspective, a regard for matters that other militaries considered small. Elite units disbanded after one too many scandals tarnished their names, the dead villagers or supported despots. The Serrice Guard had existed for twelve thousand years, born from the knightly orders of the asari medieval age. Drin Haylar never understood the gravity of her promise to help the slaves when she escaped, the responsibility of upholding such ancient honor. She wanted to help the Dread Claws' captives because she genuinely sympathized with them, too. As Charval cried into the nape of her neck and Lonwabo showed utter lack of surprise at such a sight, the desire became overwhelming. She'd go mad if surrounded by this misery any longer.

When he returned to his blanket that cluttered a corner of the north tunnel's crawl space, Charval numbly bundled himself in the stained sheet and tried to overcome his shattered nerves.

He was glad for the darkness. Low light kept his wretched state from being plain for others to see, to scrutinize or judge. He had stumbled in the dark, tripped over Vallon, waking him in the process, and knew that he was watched with fleeting interest. The other salarians in the tunnel slept or were near sleep. He missed privacy. Charval had always been slow to process through emotional piques. He became bothered by small worries that his kin never registered. What another salarian might be depressed about for an hour usually took Charval a day to overcome.

After the sobbing in front of Falindra, then on her, the feeling that refused to go away was embarrassment.

Everything he'd told her was true and it seemed to have only earned him scorn. His thoughts first focused on speculating why she disliked him, but inevitably returned to the reoccurring theme of the misery that was his life.

The questions he hated most from new acquaintances were ones about his job. They came up constantly, were considered part of polite conversation. He was an illusionist. It was all he ever wanted to be. When he'd been young, his friends eagerly awaited to see "Potes' latest tricks". He dreamed of being an esteemed man of his craft, who single-handedly brought it back into the fold of mainstream entertainment alongside music and comedy. He'd perform on variety shows alongside famed comedian, Manny Zuppo, and adored asari singer, Arah T'Hass. He'd make buildings disappear in front of an audience's eyes with a few buttons on his personally modified, micro omni-tool, then deliver a musical performance with a four-piece band consisting of his spontaneously created holographic clones, each one playing a different instrument. His dalatross clamored to negotiate mating contracts for him, scoffing at the smaller offers.

Only none of those things happened. He delivered small performances in restaurants or charity events, occasionally at town festivals. If he was lucky, the restaurant gave him a free courtesy meal; very lucky and the local news feed might insert his name among the list of performers that the town residents should expect. His dalatross never heard of his name. Even his family's immediate matriarch laughed and shook her head at the notion of trying to bid for a mating contract with another family using his name. Men who take any small job they can find to pay their bills while obsessing over jobs that pay nothing are not worth bidding over. She kept him in her mayoral office once. She sat behind a large, sleek desk while he stood awkwardly in front of her like some child summoned for discipline, and she plainly told him: those men without prestige or affluence, are not offered into contracts. He knew that other species possessed similar vanities when it came to procreation; salarians were simply blunter about it.

Charval had no particular desire to mate, but the consideration would have been nice – if only as a stump candidate.

In many ways the Reaper War had been hardest on the salarians among the Citadel races, even though their home world had not been as devastated. The problem for a people who prize incorporating the latest and most complicated technologies into their daily lives is that the slightest damage to their infrastructure paralyzes civilization. Technology is sensitive. When it breaks down, it breaks down badly.

The asari set to their reconstruction efforts with a sense of cooperation that other peoples never matched. The turians considered the undertaking as a civic challenge to take pride in. They relished the demanding labor required to rebuild their cities. The elcor drew upon their innate patience to see them through each hardship. The salarians lacked those qualities. Their devices stopped working, then their cities, and they turned upon themselves, sometimes violently. The humans had an expression for what his people were going through; they called it 'First World Syndrome'.

He was drafted into a reconstruction team on Mannovai. The manager asked which members of the group were skilled in farming (using devices like rakes and hoes), who possessed skills as a tailor, plumber, brick layer, or mechanic. The group laughed.

They stopped laughing when they realized he was serious. The other difficult fact about a society that prided itself on technological advancement was how quickly people found their jobs became obsolete. It was a reality few people knew like the salarians. They had names for phobias for it. But the Reaper War magnified the reality a hundredfold. Holo-game designers were out of jobs. Deep ocean surveyors lost all funding. Synthesized molecule designers were at a loss on how to be productive in the macro world.

There was no demand for illusionists. The manager saw Charval's customized omni-tool and mistook him for someone with versatile technical skills. "Potes, we need a vehicular technician. You'll be perfect for it." That prophecy was quickly proved wrong. Then came computer programmer which amounted to a sequence of 'oops'. That was followed by working as a servo calibrator, which nearly caused a steel factory to explode, though he preferred not dwell on that experience. Finally, came service as a repair technician. His co-workers joked that he was their resident savant: brilliant at one thing that had no practical purpose, and utterly useless at everything else. He pretended to laugh with them, but he was always bad at hiding how he felt.

When he heard about the recruitment drive for colony workers in the Terminus: high pay, no skill required. He signed on with trepidation. He was terrified of leaving the known world behind, even when he realized that the world he knew only offered contempt and misery as lures to remain. Misery or fear, those were the inspiring options he had to choose from. He surprised his friends by choosing to venture into the unknown.

The dreams came back. A bustling new colony world where he'd prove himself vital. In the evenings exhausted from a tiring day of excavation and terraforming, he'd dazzle his fellow settler s with techno-magic. Pioneer turned celebrity, the founding father of a new and hopeful world.

The Dread Claw nicely dispelled that dream. His passenger ship was only three days out when the pirates struck.

Five months enslaved and likely presumed dead by his family. It was hard not to feel sorry for himself, every night haunted by the uselessness and powerlessness of his life.

When he stepped forward and insisted that the other slaves help nurse the batarians' wounds, when he treated Ralik's injuries, his spirit stirred with a sense of pride and purpose so long forgotten that he nearly wept right then from the exultation of it. That's why he needed to thank Falindra.

Now, that sense of jubilance vanished. He was awake in the dark tunnel, brooding. Two hours later and unable to sleep, he was the first person in the tunnel to smell the smoke filling the air and to hear screams coming from the processing room, and so he was the first person to panic in terror.


	12. Chapter 12

She had been planning this moment since her arrival, had spent weeks assessing tactical options, adversaries, environment, and contingencies. Of the latter there were few. She was, after all, fighting a delaying action. If the evacuation fell apart, she'd be stalling for more time while watching the body count grow among those she intended to rescue.

Her training took hold. She stood in the hazmat room and went through a sequence of battle meditations. She inhaled and exhaled, stretched legs and arms. Her fears and worries and longing for hopeful outcomes all ebbed away, replaced by serenity. She concentrated on the awareness of her fingers, then hands, her feet and legs, calculated her priorities, one last time, then began the operation.

She started in the hazmat room for a reason. The adjustments made to distribution pipes from the environmental control room were about to prove whether they'd been at all effective. One series of pipes extended from the sub-level with a series of redundancies and cut-offs necessary for air control in a room meant to isolate hazardous materials. She concluded her exercises. Mission stage one began. She retrieved a wrench from her pocket, courtesy of the professor's work bench, and twisted three different release valves.

In seconds, nauseating, toxic, gas was suctioned from the generators' air waste and redirected into cargo room one.

She walked steady and determined from the hazmat room, across central storage, toward the cargo room that presently filled with a noxious cloud. She readied the scorch-shooter, the second tool she had borrowed from the professor, and approached the Hastings' clubhouse.

Puffs of yellow-gray smoke already escaped in thin streams from the room, travelling along the ceiling. Falindra grabbed for the door, but before she managed to close it, the one female member of Hastings' crew crammed her body part way through the gap and began kicking. Despite the late hour, the smuggler had remained awake. Jaqueline, with black mohawk and matching black utility vest, was quick to snarl, and this certainly seemed an appropriate occasion. She'd flourished in the ranks. You didn't flourish among the ranks of Hastings' rough crew as the sole woman by being a delicate flower.

"You stupid, blue bitch. I'm going to gut you." Unfortunately, for Jaqueline, eyes watering and voice strained from breathing concentrated smog, the threat was without effect. Well, it certainly, didn't have the intended effect.

Falindra's locally famous elbow cracked against the side of the woman's noise, splaying blood across the side of her face. Jaqueline reeled back, clutching the horribly angled extension of her jaw. Tears streamed down Jaqueline's eyes, her suffering compounded by smoke. She fell on her back.

Free to resume, Falindra blasted four chunks of super-heated , super-cooling solder from the scorch-shooter. The old, half dead and half rusted tool barely had enough energy left for the last application, never mind being kept as a potential weapon going forward. At least she managed to immobilize Hastings' and his crew. They'd be gagging and puking in the cargo room for near thirty minutes before they managed to break past the door. She hoped that time estimation wasn't being generous.

Never doubting which side of the fight Hastings might choose to fall on, and having dealt with him, she proceeded toward the real fight.

She proceeded out of cargo room one, into central storage, and toward the north access tunnel. She discarded the scorch-thrower and kept the wrench for use as a club. The omni-tool shimmered into life on her other arm. Its holographic controls signaled by the tiniest controlled movements in the wrist it surrounded. She executed the first in a series of pre-programmed commands, executing a remote access to habitat power control from the computer in the operations room. The professor's room.

What few lights reliably worked in Building-B all turned off simultaneously. In a second the only illumination that remained was the fiery orange of scattered emergency lights. Their efforts to provide enough light to see by were limp. They only served to emphasize the engulfing shadows.

Gagging sounds came from nearby rooms. The exhaust had been carried through the ventilation systems despite that Falindra had triggered the control valves to keep it contained. She knew the gamble; this habitat was falling apart. The concentration levels of any smog that escaped into the rest of Building-B would be relatively thin. If the slaves took so long to flee that the toxins became a bother, then they'd taken far too long to escape no matter what.

Now she heard murmurs coming from the crawl spaces and cubby holes. Frightened voices questioned each other in loud whispers. What happened to the lights? Had they lost power? Would they lose air? Were the krogan intentionally killing them all off?

Falindra took measured steps, arms poised to parry anyone who attempted to lunge upon her in the dark. She felt the floor panels under her feet, knew intuitively to lift her left foot high over a busted rebar that jutted from the wall at ankle level. She knew when to take steps in the darkness when she past the recreation room. Santina came out from the doorway to investigate the loss of light. She had stayed with the batarians throughout the night, every night for the past three. The patients were slow on the mend, in her estimation, and might need emergency medical attention if they took a turn for the worse while they slept. The broad, muscled Ralik came out next, towering over the girl. They watched Falindra stalk the corridor and Ralik pulled the little girl behind him. He recognized the look of a predator.

Falindra had a brief thought about the strangeness of seeing a batarian protecting a child from the likes of an asari. The Reaper War had left the universe upside-down. Then her mind expelled the unnecessary thought so suddenly, it was as though the thought had never existed. She kept going, checking the shadows, the open doorways, the piles of bric-a-brac that someone might hunker behind in ambush.

Despite, the caution, she moved at a fair pace. If she waited too long, if she delayed in preoccupying the minimal garrison who remained, every captive would be at risk. She walked along the north corridor, aware of salarian eyes on her from where their owners lied. She moved through the extension hall of Building-A, and finally arrived in the processing room.

She looked into the surreal mechanical hell. An amplitude of emergency lights shot orange and white beams in a bizarre array of directions. Their regulators malfunctioned. Some flickered; some were as dim as ancient oil lanterns, a few cast piercing lights that could burn into retinas if someone stared into them too long. Their patterns resembled a kaleidoscopic display more appropriate to a fringe area no-laws-allowed dance club than a factory floor.

Shadows extended in countless numbers under the lunatic light. Machinery, conveyor belts, cogs, industrial drills, systems stations, operating booths, pallet jacks, portable refrigeration units, they all cast a multitude of dark companions.

Guttural voices bickered from the far end of the enormous room, past the conveyor belts and their control systems. The first vorcha were already prowling. One sounded like Kryts. His voice, so like what Falindra imagined perverted, lecherous, frogs might sound like if given the power of speech, was hard to forget since the night he and Drau Gorba had taunted her after the return from her foray across the moonscape. She was unsure about the other one, but thought it was the shirker, Milch. She hadn't counted on that. He was one of the more tactical fighters once roused to a fight, according to Gursk, and she anticipated he'd be among the vorcha that Drau Bodix brought in his raiding party.

She briefly wondered the odds of her survival over the next ten minutes. Regardless of how inept the Dread Claw were at running an illegal mining operation, or in their roles as wardens, or even at building security, each one of them was a brutal warrior, equally deadly with weapons or in a brawl, possessing a series of kills to his credit that he could, and often did, truthfully boast about. As for the vorcha, violence was the one thing surely taught from parent to child, both the value and the act. Casual bloodshed, she supposed, meant little to a species whose regenerative abilities seemed near supernatural.

And there were few things in the galaxy as frightening or as unstoppable as a krogan warrior in the frenzy of a blood rage.

She wondered whether she'd live, processing the thought without emotion. It was an intellectual curiosity, nothing more. Her mind was honed on awareness of her body and her surroundings.

Drin and Gursk waited in the far corner of the room behind a loaded pallet jack. The professor averted his eyes from Dread Claw members that came through, as though being unable to see them made him simultaneously invisible if they strayed far right and looked his way. Her allies waited to sneak behind and past the two vorcha.

Another flickering thought in that part of her brain that was now detached, cataloging irrelevant observations for later reflection. She decided that Gursk was cuter than Kryts. Cute in a savage beast sort of way. It must have been the eyes, able to express curiosity and complete dumbness at the same time so effortlessly. The part of her brain in control looked at Kryts and Milch, assessed their posture, which of the two was in better shape, where vertebrate were located along a vorcha spine, and which bones needed to be broken before this type of creature was incapacitated.

All three krogan entered the doorway: Gorba, Loze, and Hurx. The bloated Drau Gorba snarled, furious that any incident deviated from the normal conditions of the habitat, the normal submissiveness he demanded of the slaves. He was already half way into a blood rage. Once they made their way as far as the room's control computer station, the renegade vorcha with a squat, volus companion snuck behind.

Falindra was ready. There were still two vorcha missing. She refused to delay for fear that one of the Dread Claw already present might find reason to double back. She had to hope that the unaccounted members of the gang were not in a position to intercept her saboteurs.

Kryts moved through the center of the room, saw her and hissed. He stalked directly toward her. Milch veered to the side, around the first conveyor belt, flanking her. They coordinated with the animal precision of a hunter pack. Her friends (in her mind, team two: saboteur detachment), were now twenty meters behind Milch, moved along the wall toward the door into the antechamber that led to the security room.

She inhaled a single, deep breath. Exhale.

"What are you doing here? You responsible for the power loss?" sneered Kryts in his signature way that scrunched his face and exposed his fangs.

"Yes," answered Falindra plainly. "I'm responsible. I'm planning to escape."

The straightforward response was unexpected and Kryts stood still a moment, taken off guard. He interpreted the answer as poor wit, the response of a slave who needed to be put in her proper place. Of course that meant issuing a thorough beating, but it started with insults. He opened his mouth to conjure a tirade. This was his mistake, reacting in any way that did not produce immediate lethal results.

Falindra brought her omni-tool back to life. The device she wasn't supposed to have. She activated the pre-programmed commands in the ice drill she'd operated. The one she re-wired.

They really never should have given her access to heavy machinery.

The processing room boomed with a barrage of metallic noise. Illumination was not restored. The room's occupants still only saw through the dim of lattice-work light beams. Everything else came to life. The conveyor belts began grinding away on misaligned cogs. Compressors hummed inside the coolant units. The ice drills buzzed with a blur of rotations. The one that Falindra operated made a screeching noise in its mechanical elbow as it disengaged safety protocols and bore right through the large ice-catcher, penetrating the ground. There was no sub-level below Building A, just earth.

Kryts turned his head in surprise as the drill blasted into the ground and launched an explosion of stone shrapnel and bits of floor panelling.

Falindra bolted toward him, augmenting her speed with the trace biotic strength she was able to summon. By the time he looked back from the drill to where she'd been standing, she was already at his side. She rammed the wrench into his, piercing the thick hide.

Kryts shrieked in pain. Dark blood jetted from the wound. His knees buckled and he clutched a useless hand around the wrench that jutted from below his jawline like an alien extremity. Even as the life blood shot out, his inclination was to retaliate rather than seek safety. He lashed out clumsily with his other claw. Falindra grabbed it, twisted the wrist, and extended his arm in a lock. He resisted with a surprising reservoir of strength, tried using his weight to ram into the side of the nearby conveyor belt. She pivoted to his side and steered his body with the controlled arm lock. His own momentum did the rest. His face fell into the conveyor belt, the long vorcha muzzle caught in one of the rotating cogs. It grabbed hold of his nose, pulled, and crushed. Kryts shrieked in agony until it was no longer physically possible, his face ripped off by the unstoppable cog, ground to pulp. His spastic body broke free only once there was not much face left to save, and fell to the ground.

The other Dread Claw members scrambled for cover from the swarm of debris that flew at their heads. They saw what happened to Kryts and shared a moment of disbelief. When power was lost, the most plausible answer was malfunction. Malfunctions happened three times a day. They saw a slave where she should not have been, but slaves who became malcontents were fuelled by shattered nerves and easily forced to a cowering heel. This was different. This was a battle.

Milch pulled a nasty Executioner pistol and fired. The round ricocheted off a flying rock with a single spark. Loze moved along the second conveyor belt, trying to avoid exposure to all the flying shrapnel while he made his way toward ice drills. Gorba lost reason and succumbed to the savagery of a blood rage. He charged straight toward Falindra, barrelling through the cloud of dust the drills had turned up. Unbridled krogan adrenaline made him virtually impervious to the pain and injury as stones shot at him from the whirlwind that was filling the room. He was a bison, raging, wanting only to gore and kill.

Falindra decided that her odds of survival had been much reduced.

Nobody in the tunnels knew that it was the ice drill impaling the floor that caused the sound. They had simply heard an explosion. It came from Building A.

Smoke wafted through the cargo section off Building B.

It was still dark. The slaves huddled in bands of three or four, looking to one another for either an answer or solace and finding neither. In the orange dim their faces made them all resemble ghouls. Such faces offered no comfort. A savage, hateful bellow unleashed through the darkened north tunnel caused Jocelyn to involuntarily shiver. She recognized Drau Gorba's roar and knew it meant someone was going to die. She found Louis' face in the darkness, her lover and sharer in torment, and kissed his dry lips with desperate sadness. They held each other tightly until the embrace hurt and they refused to let go.

She heard someone running toward them and assumed she was going to die. She felt numb, as sad to die in such a wretched place as she was grateful to be finished with it. A gurgling, amphibian voice called out her name. Sye Videl's athletic drell form appeared out of the darkness and smoke like an apparition. A batarian's larger figure followed. They made for a strange partnership when she considered that one had nearly maimed the other for sport only a few weeks ago. More surprising was when she made out the forms of the others who followed: Muriel, Lonwabo, Kenji, and Santina, each one frightened and confused, herded along as Sye kept ushering them along. Some of the other humans stood further behind. She thought she saw one of the quarians near Kenji.

Excited, Drin tried and failed to whisper. "We need to move," he said. "We're leaving. You need to move. No time for me to explain or you to collect your stuff." As if they had any 'stuff' worth taking. "We still have to grab the salarians."

His call for them to rush seemed to produce the very opposite result. Muriel urged everyone to cover their mouths with wet cloths to minimize the effects of the cloud. "We're being poisoned. Dear Lord, they're poisoning us." The tough Irish woman's became spiteful, as if she might be half tempted to brawl the krogan if only to face her murderers directly. Nobody heeded her advice and this upset her more, despite that she gave no suggestion where these cloths should come from – whether people should rip strips from shirts – or where to soak them.

Lonwabo tried comforting her, putting an arm around her shoulder. His hand shook violently from nerves.

"We're not being poisoned," said Sye. Jocelyn wished he sounded convinced. "Just move."

Another explosion erupted from Building A. The whole habitat quaked. Louis screamed in fear. His grip on her had become tight enough to cause bruises. She realized that a scream escaped her, too.

"Their enemies are attacking us," said Louis. "I'm amazed it took this long. They're bombing us. I survived the Reaper assault on Brussels so that drunken alien pirates could kill me."

They tripped over one another, pacing narrow, mad circles like panicked cattle. There was war in the building and they all screamed and trembled with each eruption of noise or tremor that vibrated through the walls.

Finally, Sye shoved and prodded little Santina down the access corridor toward the south tunnel. Kenji followed unthinkingly and soon, so did the others, grunting and grumbling incoherently, coughing from the smoke.

Leading the escapees (most of them not yet grasping this plan, the few who did grasp disbelieved it), Sye was rewarded with a punch to the face as they entered the southern tunnel. Vallon had commanded the other salarians to barricade themselves, accomplished with pieces of busted wall panelling. He stumbled through the improvised fortification. Jocelyn found it difficult to imagine the defense standing more than a second against one of the krogan behemoths.

Vallon, Charval and the rest of the salarians scrambled around Sye when they finally recognized him. They flooded him with questions instead of fists, for which he was grateful, and once more Sye, his wits fraying, tried galvanizing the people assembled around him, urging them in the direction of the access route to the room that housed the power generators.

"We can't go there," said Vallon. He was shrill. He jabbed a finger at Sye, unapologetic about the feeble punch he delivered moments before. "There's screaming coming from there. There's fighting."

'it's coming from the processing room," Muriel corrected the salarian leader.

"No wait," interjected Charval Potes. He tilted his ear toward the ground. "People are fighting below us. In the sub-level. I can hear one of the krogan yelling."

"They killed the volus," concluded Santina, pressed against Kenji's leg.

"Where is Trez," shouted Tasa'Nel. The female quarian shouted above the din, horrified at the disappearance of her male counterpart. "Has anyone seen him? Is he still in the north corridor?" She tried pushing her way backward. The dumbstruck humans still in the access tunnel barred her path.

Charval wore panic in his flushed face and the large 'O's his eyes made. Jocelyn thought he was right. The fighting was below. The fighting was everywhere. No matter which way they went, they were going to die.

Drin thought his heart might explode, or maybe his head. The fear and adrenaline that coursed through him made it hard to tell which body part cried out in protest the most. Three times he checked the holographic safety indicators summoned with the flicker of an eye to confirm that his pressure suit was not malfunctioning. Everything functioned normally. He was not going to explode, not as the result of a damaged environmental suit anyway. The all-encompassing layer of skin that made cohabitation with other species possible was not always the most comfortable garment. It struggled to adapt to bursts of exertion from the wearer.

Having a grenade fastened to his belt did not make him feel like his body was any safer. 'Micro-grenade' she called it, yet he imagined an enormous weight dragging on him, was inescapably aware of its presence, attached like some evil leech eager to unleash a nasty surprise: "hey, volus, bet you didn't know I'm on a timer that's about to hit zero, hee hee."

He kept up with Gursk, legs performing an awkward display, something between run and waddle. He was amazed that the two of them made it out of the processing room without being noticed.

They reached the security room door. Gursk punched in a code and it slid open. Simple. Done. No exploding grenade necessary. Relief flooded him. He let go a breath that had been trapped in his throat. His limbs, stiff as stone, relaxed a little. They made it past the door.

Except that moments after they left the antechamber, a series of earth quakes shook the whole building. He struggled to keep to his feet.

Gursk led him up a ramp and into the security room. Two swivel chairs faced a wall of computers. Neon green streams of data flooded a column of monitors.

An exasperated vorcha, Rog, stared at the information, grunting threats at the computers for providing him an impossible puzzle.

Panic threatened to seize Drin. One of the Dread Claw in the very room they needed. It was not a large room either. No sneaking past or around. He and Gursk stood at the doorway in plain view, five feet from Rog. The security room had independent power. The ceiling fluorescence hurt Drin's eyes after the darkness that accompanied them on their way here.

Rog turned and looked at the two arrivals standing dumbly under the light.

Drin waited for the inevitable flash of claws and the violent struggle. Gursk growled and Rog responded in kind. Among the vorcha, such greetings might have been a form of hello, but Drin didn't think it was likely.

"What is it," croaked Rog.

Where the idea came from he didn't know. A stroke of genius he took greater pride in, during that moment, than all research and computations he'd ever done mapping lightning storms. "I was told to restore power," he said. "There's a fight with the slaves down in processing. Gorba wants your help."

All plausible. Drin was the person that the Dread Claw relied on to keep system operations functional. Even in the security room, one floor up and one long corridor away, the cacophony coming from below was obvious.

"Power not lost. Someone controlling it," Rog said.

"I'll figure it out, I'm sure," replied Drin. "Go join the fight."

Rog pushed past them without further words and left the room. He was vorcha. Given the choice between staring at computers and taking part in a fight, it took little guess work to anticipate which one he favored.

That was it. They'd done it. Drin and Gursk were in the security room. They made their way into a part of the habitat that the Dread Claw declared forbidden to anyone but themselves and they'd done it without explosive grenades or shed blood. Now they simply had to cut power completely before the pirates retook control.

A sudden, terrible thought struck him. While Sye led the other captives toward the eastern exit and while he and Gursk worked to disable the habitat's power, Falindra kept all the Dread Claw in the building busy. If the fights weren't lousy odds against her already, he'd just sent one more combatant into the mix against her. He cursed himself. He had a flash mental image of Falindra getting the advantage in some brutal melee only for Rog to arrive by surprise and kill her. If that happened, he'd never forgive himself.

"Were we going to do anything now," asked Gursk, bringing him out of his reverie. He turned to respond with instructions, then stopped. His vorcha student had slung a strangely decorated assault rifle over one shoulder. The weapon made sense. What lay tucked under his other arm did not: the metal, square abacus.

"Falindra told you not to bring any personal items. It will slow us down. And there might not be room on whatever vehicle she plans on using for our escape. You really need to leave that thing behind."

Gursk pouted. "Abacus my friend. Betrayal to leave behind." He shielded the contraption with his body from the professor's reach.

"I'm glad that it means so much to you, Gursk. I'd be happy to make you a new one later. For now, get rid of it so we can concentrate on the task before us."

The vorcha persisted. "But what if new abacus uses different sort of math. Then me have to start learning my multiplications all over again."

That was the argument that finally broke Drin, a man with five degrees from prestigious schools of higher learning; leading researcher in the fields of geophysics, atmospheric chemistry, and electromagnetics; professor who awed thousands students year after year; author of thirty published articles in respected journals – seven of them circulated by professional associations among other civilizations… and he'd finally met his match. He had not the will to win this debate.

"Fine, keep the damned thing. I don't care anymore. It's now vital you keep it with you." He pointed to the work station that Rog had abandoned. "Now help me with these computers."

Gursk smiled at his victory, cavity-filled fangs proudly displayed, and dutifully stayed at the professor's side.

They approached the monitors. Displays of temperature control, air purity, energy efficiency, lighting, radiation shields all blinked or scrolled in cycled, confirming what the slaves already knew. The environmental systems were failing. Without repairs the habitat would become uninhabitable within another year, two at the most. Assuming it didn't blow up in the next hour.

Below the monitors were holographic keyboards and a reserve physical one. Service panels and a junction box lined the corner of the room. Higher up, green and red lights provided condition indicators at a glance. Most of the green ones were dark, the reds bright.

Drin attempted bringing up root command menus. He tapped the hologram buttons. They dematerialized every few seconds from the plague of corruptions in the systems. Frustrated, he switched to the physical keyboard, but his luck remained the same. This time he was victim of his own volus fingers, too stubby for the streamlined keyboard. He aimed for one button and hit three. It seemed that hours were going by and his thoughts kept returning to fear for Falindra, for the slaves. Had the Dread Claw killed them all already? Were the prisoners stranded outside the habitat, exposed to radiation, bewildered and afraid? He took pride in his mental discipline, his ability to focus on intellectual challenges, to solve puzzles. Those talents were lost to him now. The violent din of fighting erupted once more and he quivered.

He had no luck with the root commands. The security systems in the software that had been provided by the habitat's original creators were impressive. And they compounded by the corruptions and glitches that came with an old and mismanaged computer. He tried a different tact, raising the navigational menu, exploring for automatic programs and command prompts.

"Gursk, do you know if the Drau used any passwords to access certain controls?"

"Mmm, maybe." Gursk looked on, first fascinated by the furious pace at which the Drin attacked the keyboard, but quickly growing bored.

"Do they ever let you use the computer? Do you understand them?" He knew these were foolish questions as soon as they came aloud.

"Fun to punch."

"On that, I heartily agree." He desperately wanted to keep up his part of Falindra's plan. He'd berated her about planning any escape without taking the other captive workers into account, beset upon her the moral duty to take their well-being into consideration. Now she was holding off a small horde violent renegades by herself, giving time for everyone to escape. The smallest adversary still doubled her weight. Vorcha and krogan were both known for their love of turning any fight into a melee. He was sure she was already dead, except that the continued blasts of noise suggested different.

The navigation menus were useless, root commands inaccessible. "Infernal machine." His environmental suit flashed warnings about a rise in body temperature. He cursed his failure to concentrate. Half the noises (and that was many), made him snap his head around. No matter how many times, he was convinced a krogan was about to enter the room and catch them.

"Mechano-Man, what's that word for what we're supposed to do again," asked Gursk, aware of his companion's frustration.

"Huh," said Drin, distracted. He tried opening a settings option in the computer. "You mean 'sabotage'? We're supposed to sabotage the habitat's power."

"Right, that's it." Gursk clicked his teeth. "And, uh, Mechano-Man?"

"Yes," he said, unable to disguise his irritation with the vorcha's prattling.

"What does 'sabotage' mean again?"

"To break! Understand? We have to shut down all the power in the habitat. Break the power distribution. Or people counting on us are going to die. Why this is essential , who knows? I've little idea what plotting goes on in that asari's head; but this is what we promised to do."

"Oh!" Gursk was joyous with understanding. "Should have told me. Me is great at breaking things. People say all the time. Me the best sabotage-ist on whole planet."

"You know how to shut down the power," Drin whimpered.

"Sure." Gursk grinned, pleased with himself. He grabbed hold of Drin, snatched the micro grenade that was still fastened to Drin's belt, turned, and kicked the locked lid to the junction box until it crumpled. He activated the grenade and dropped it into the inner workings of the box.

"All done," he said triumphantly, waiting for praise to commence.

Drin stared at him, a strange squawk clicked through his respirator. He was, if only for a moment, dumbfounded.

"You lunatic," Drin screamed. He started running.

The short volus legs had no chance of getting him far enough before the explosion overtook him. Something hit him hard from behind. Then came blackness.

The fight continued in the processing room amidst a raging storm of churned up earth and stone scattering across the room. A series of large chunks of quartz rocketed into the ceiling, deafening in their attempt to perforate the steel. A membrane held the flute in the wall that carried ice from upper orbit into the habitat. If one of those bigger rocks ricocheted back, somehow found its way past the drills, and punctured a hole through one of those thin membranes, the room's air supply was going to make a nasty exit.

Falindra had powered up the omni-tool and released an electric charge against Drau Gorba, stopping him in the midst of his charge. It overloaded focal circuits in his armor as surely as the nerve bundles under his flesh. He dropped to his knees, stunned long enough for an oval piece of limestone to crack against the side of his head, concussing him.

She dropped down behind the conveyor belt just as bullets rang out from Milch's Executioner. Then Milch was forced to take cover once more against flying debris. It was her rotten luck that Kryts had carried no weapons of his own for her to loot. Worse luck that he stirred in semi-consciousness. Face torn off and he still refused to die, a testament to the regenerative powers of the vorcha.

The dust in the air created a sandy cloud that obstructed her view, but Drau Loze looked to be nearing the top of the ice drill. If he severed the hydraulics before she retreated and brought an end to whirlwind of rock, Milch would be free to take aim at his leisure. Meanwhile, Drau Hurx moved from one piece of cover to the next, snarling manic threats against her that were lost to the clamor of rock and steel.

Another vorcha came through from the antechamber. Her odds were getting worse.

The instinctive muscles and mind focused a reserve of her biotic strength and she sped toward the muscular Drau Hurx in a blur of graceful strides, weaving through machinery and flying rock faster than he hoped to react. She slid into his foot, allowing him to punch air where her head might have been, crippling his balance. A tight roll brought her behind him and she jumped back to her feet.

Rather than regain his stance, Hurx turned, furiously seeking to connect with his armored fist. His arm was a pile driver, brute force eager to pound her into the earth with a single, mighty strike. She dodged left, and grabbed the arm in a lock (Serrice Guard martial training included a variety of holds and limb locks appropriate to the musculature and bone structure of fifteen sapient species; later Falindra would be thankful for the eclectic range of threats she'd been trained to fight against). She redirected Hurx' own momentum and poor balance, pulled him into a roll, and sent him tumbling down the slope of disgorged , broken ground. She conjured another spasm of biotic energy. Properly equipped, she could throw him across half the room. In this case it was enough to push him those few extra meters. He slid into reach of a machine's evil appetite and, caught in the gigantic ice drill's torc, was reduced to a spray of orange blood in an instant. Falindra forced herself not to look.

Battle conditioning propelled her toward the next threat without reflection. Later, she'd marvel at besting a krogan in hand-to-hand.

Later, she'd have nightmares.

She peaked up, saw that Milch still kept his head down, and vaulted over the conveyor belt. She concentrated all the biotic strength in her grasp to summon and raised a blue, translucent barrier that repelled pebbles-turned-bullets. It wasn't enough. A score of stings pierced her, drawing blood from her head, her arms, her back.

Milch risked coming out of cover once more and took aim at the location she'd left behind. She unleashed another electric burst from the omni-tool. The circuits in his firearm sparked and fizzled.

Bracing herself against further pain, she broke cover, hand-springing back over the conveyor belt, and ran. She refused to acknowledge the stinging sensation the covered her body, wiping away a trickle of blood from her brow before it got into her eyes.

When she was twenty feet from the door, the world went dark and silent. A few of the emergency lights still held out thanks to independently reserved batteries, but most of them died. The ice drills died. And the coolant units. The environmental and air control systems, dead.

She forced herself to smile at the moment. Drin and Gursk had been successful. The Dread Claw would panic, convinced that the slaves were seizing control of the habitat, commandeering power, the building's ability to support life. There was one room above all that maintained those essentials. Pleased that she'd lasted this long, she prayed that she only needed to keep the Dread Claw busy a little longer for Sye to lead all the slaves to safety.

She sprinted through the extension access. As she reached the opening of the north tunnel, the heavy footfalls of vorcha and krogan echoed closed behind. An ear splitting boom bounced through the narrow corridor as Milch gambled a blind shot, then another. She ran through the north tunnel and into central storage where she stopped abruptly. Several humans and salarians were huddled around cargo room two. She barely saw them in the darkness and distance, just hints of outlines that she'd have easily missed if not for the training and sense of awareness the Serrice Guard had instilled in her. But they were there and she refused to risk letting one of her adversaries chance upon them and decide that an easier kill suited their mood.

"Sye, get them out of here," she screamed.

Falindra grabbed dangling rebar from the ceiling and pressed herself against the wall around the corner of the tunnel, waiting for a berserker to charge through.

Rog had taken point in the darkness. His striped body came barreling down the passage. He noticed her hiding in wait too late to avoid being clotheslined by the steel rebar. It collided with Rog's neck. His feet continued sprinting forward, coming out from under him. No sooner did he hit the ground before Milch came next.

Falindra gripped the rebar like a quarterstaff, landing an assault against the second vorcha's hand with a vicious thwack that jettisoned the pistol from his grasp.

Both her assailants rebounded from their injuries sooner than she liked. Rog rose to his feet, even as she landed a second blow across his back. He returned her a murderous glare in exchange. They came at her at different angles, claws swiping the air, testing her reflexes. She parried the first few strikes, countering with an attack that cracked bone in Milch's arm. He barely flinched.

She spun the rebar deftly and pounced back, inviting their second assault, maintaining spatial awareness. One krogan thundered down the tunnel behind his vorcha shock troops and would join the melee in seconds. The last of the slaves had disappeared from perception.

No longer needing to stall and feeling no desire to test her prowess against three attackers at once, Falindra pulled away. Rog lunged after. She dropped to a crouch and swung the rebar against his ankles. The hapless creature found himself sprawled on his back once more and howled.

She stood up as Drau Loze burst into the dim of emergency light and barely dodged his ramming attack. He hit the wall, buckling the metal panel.

Falindra cursed the misfortune that the Executioner pistol had landed several meters away. It was an easy impulse to run for it, but she'd be too quickly encircled and trapped. With the slaves safely out of sight, she sprung toward the ramp access to the sub-level. Milch reached out, failing to grab hold of her. His claws raked her shoulder. The pain bloomed. Spots of green and red colored her vision.

Her honed sense of awareness made her aware of very trickle of blood, the dark rivulets that followed the grooves of her shoulder blade.

She sprinted across the central storage room and down the ramp. Her diligent exercises paid rewards for the routines she maintained. Her feet knew where to step. She deftly navigated pile of rubble and pothole. The vorcha tripped in the darkness, falling on top of each other and rolling awkwardly down the slope, allowing Falindra to gain a small lead on them.

"Get her," said Loze. "We can't let her seize operations."

Falindra's mind smiled. The krogan had correctly guessed where she was headed, exactly as she hoped, and for a perfectly logical and utterly wrong reason. To a krogan, fights were for territory (the ones not fought for status, or wealth, or sport). It would never occur to him that she chose to fight with the intention of escaping. Non-krogan were too weak, too contemptible. They did not fight their way out, they snuck.

She chastised herself for being pleased. She was bleeding all over, stone fragments embedded in her skin, her shoulder had gone numb, and Sye had not progressed as far as she'd hoped. Success was very much unassured.

She made it into the sub-level and ran the circle from primary to secondary corridor, trusting her instincts through the underworld ambient blackness until she finally arrived in the operations room, what she had come to think of as the professor's lab.

Two pursuers were coming from behind. That meant one chose to go in a large circle to come at her through the room's second entrance. The ones that followed were closing the gap – falling into the ambush.

Falindra leaped high and grabbed onto the distribution pipes that ran along the ceiling. Holding on with one hand, she retrieved the L-shape pipe piece she had hidden on top and stabbed it far enough into the exhaust pipe for the self-sealing concrete gel to take hold. She stripped off the protective coating and the gel hardened immediately. It became her one prepared firearm. She dropped back to the ground. With power turned off there was only enough stored pressure in the exhaust pipe for one shot. She slid open the barrel access on the 'L' and dropped a handful of the professor's spare bolts, finding for them, what she determined, was an infinitely more practical purpose than the construction of abaci.

She aimed into the tunnel at her two pursuers and pulled the release valve. The 'L' pipe's mouth opened. A dozen bolts shot out at eight hundred psi. It was only one shot, but it was devastating.

Two bolts perforated Drau Loze's arm. His scream echoed throughout the sub-level. Three more bolts connected with Milch, one tearing right through his skull, shredding brain matter. His body dropped hard. There would be no regeneration from that sort of injury.

She slid the door closed and hitched the lock, then moved to the opposite door and did the same. Let Loze and Rog waste time trying to force their way in. The longer they believed she kept herself barricaded in the room the better. She jumped up and grabbed the ceiling-latched pipes once more, this time swinging on top of them. Lying on her back, she punched through the weakened circle made in the ceiling weeks ago when, apparently, sipping mushroom tea inspired the creation of secret escape routes.

She pushed aside storage containers and pulled herself up through the small exit, embarking on a circuitous route back through reclamation, then processing room, toward the antechamber and main exit.

She ran past the now dormant ice drill, averting her eyes from the carnage that was once the body of Drau Hurx spread in long streaks as though the work of a macabre artist slinging blotches of paint across the floor.

The lighting was dimmer. Low battery reserves on the emergency lights were depleted. Falindra ran past the coolant storage and was nearing the far exit when a wall of brute force slammed into her side. The power of the collision was mind-boggling. She careened across the floor, head banging into a pallet jack, convinced that a hover car had driven into her.

Her brain bounced in her skull, sending a cascade of stars across her vision once more. The air had been expelled from her lungs and refused to return.

The silhouette of Drau Gorba loomed before her, his massive girth blocking view of the room. His tree-trunk leg wasted no time pressing the advantage and kicked into her abdomen, cracking Falindra's lower ribs.

"You thought to kill me." He grabbed her by the neck, yanked her from the ground. He held her face close, his hot, fetid breath shared between them. "You thought to put the Drau Clan to shame." He flung her through the air toward the second ice drill, docile in its iron base and membrane wall. The point of the enormous drill extended down from its latticed boom, staring at her.

The childhood memory of the night sky came unbidden, her mind tripping through semi-consciousness, another evening with her mother, very late, well past her bedtime. Her mother had come back and forth twice from the house, insisting Falindra come in and get ready for bed, vexed that her toddler was defiant, guilty because it seemed wrong to deprive the little girl of the wonder that held her captive. Falindra was tired, so tired, yet she refused to go inside. She'd stay out late, all night if she had to, staring off into the majesty of the firmament, the sea of dotted light, the spectral nebula cloud of pink and purple and blue. She stayed, hoping that if she remained long enough, the grand mystery that hid in the night's beauty would at last reveal itself, rewarding the young child for her devotions. She was a quiet and kindly child and people were always surprised on those rare occasions when set her will to do something, how strong her resolve became. She refused to retire into the house or succumb to fatigue.

The memory receded and the processing room returned. She tried getting to her feet, cried when the effort failed. Her body felt broken. Her ribs, her shoulder, now her ankle from the way she landed.

Gorba caught up to the distance of his pitch, grabbed her and threw her again. She fell across the length of a conveyor belt. The rage in him was not a blood rage, but cold hate, slowly building, nurtured to the pending climax.

"All promises are off. You're dying now. I'm going to crush every bone. I'm going to wear your teeth as souvenirs."

The drill reflected the small beams of emergency light behind him, bestowing the iconography of a titan revelling in conquest.

Sye considered himself a great escapist. He'd escaped from the best: law enforcement, gangsters, black marketeers, loan sharks, outraged fathers. He had considerable talent for getting into debt and getting into trouble, but an unrivalled gift for getting out of what he'd gotten into.

Self-preservation never prepared him for leading a bickering, panicked mob.

Kenji frantically held onto Santina's hand, squeezing tightly for fear she'd get lost or fall behind. She protested continuously against the pain of being held too tight. Vallon became apoplectic when Sye explained that they were departing the habitat, convinced they would die of exposure within seconds of being outside. He demanded they return to the tunnels and took three steps back the way they came before he realized that nobody followed. Returning alone must have been a more fearful prospect because he fell back into the disorganized line. Muriel insisted they were going in the wrong direction, that the smog, undoubtedly of terrible lethality, was thickest ahead and that another route must be chosen. It was irrelevant that Sye had explained only one route existed for where they headed.

The young asari, Caleen, lamented how they were all going to die from exposure or die once the Dread Claw learned of their attempted escape, repeating these worries over like a preacher warning of divine judgment. Jocelyn kept telling her to shut up, but without much emphasis, throwing the words in during the intervals of Caleen's repeated prophecies. It was a two-man act. "We are going to die." "Shut up." We are going to die." "Shut up."

The generators, dead metal cylinders now that the power was down, formed a series of columns leading to the hatch. Ahead, on the other side of that hatch waited an all-terrain vehicle with reprogrammed navigational systems. Falindra had instructed the auto-homing chip to activate the vehicle and reposition it at the alternative lot from the one by the shuttles, had instructed Sye to drive fifty meters west – behind terrain and beyond view from the habitat's windows – at which time the homing beacon would power down, leaving the Dread Claw to later speculate whether the escapees had simply driven off toward the next illegal mining encampment. Sye was to then turn north and head toward the shuttle pad. She'd told him which ship to board and what the access codes were. All he needed to do was get people to walk. Somehow it proved a struggle.

The humans coughed. The salarians wheezed. The asari bemoaned allergic reactions. The quarian complained of damaged seals in her pressure suit.

"We're almost there," he reassured for the ninth time.

"Almost at our deaths, you mean." Vallon curled his lips, resentful that none of his peers volunteered to follow him back.

'From toxic gas to toxic moon, really not an improvement," Muriel quipped.

It was not Sye's custom to remain in the company of people complaining at him. He pondered a few clever remarks that might embarrass them into compliance. Before he had the chance to use his favorite, Jocelyn screamed.

One vorcha had noticed the stragglers in the storage room, though Falindra struggled to keep them from being noticed. That vorcha then suppressed his blood lust long enough to consider the absence of slaves in the tunnel, and then thought that investigation might not be so bad an idea.

Spub had a sickly, mud green hue to his skin and was distinguishable by the sharply crooked teeth that hung from his mouth. He was not particularly cunning, nor stupid. He was not the best warrior, but certainly not the worst. His cruelties toward the captive workers saw no greater excess than those delivered by his cohorts. He was an average, feral, ravaging vorcha, as much feared and hated by the people that surrounded Sye as any other overseer.

Perhaps that's why what happened next unfolded the way it did. Sye later wondered if Falindra had prophesied it, the very reason she insisted they all find accord when nursing the batarians.

Unable to remain the inconspicuous tracker, Spub charged toward the throng. A chorus of shrieks responded. He bounded forward and they all fell back, flotsam struck by a tidal wave and pressed them against the fjord.

Dagger in hand, Spub latched onto the first person in reach. He grabbed Caleen, spun her around, claws digging into her neck, her body serving as a shield. The claws pressed in, drawing blood, and she whimpered. He pointed the dagger at the crowd with his other hand. The overseer reduced to hostage taker. He didn't care where the others went. If he kept hold of one when the krogan allowed the rest to escape, the prestige he carried among his own peers would increase. Spub looked forward to taunting Milch and Rog.

"She's mine." He jabbed the dagger at air. The crowd stood paralyzed, watching as Caleen cried and asked for home and stumbled backward on her heels.

The cloud of fumes made its way into the generator room. Nobody coughed. Dread had cured their ailments. Sye juggled ideas of how to secure the asari girl's return and found them all wanting for plausibility.

Then he heard a funny scream, a frantic war cry, high pitched, not ferocious, or even particularly manly, but unmistakable.

"No!"

Charval Potes broke free from whatever spell had turned them into living stone. Easily terrified by situations far less dangerous, he was not one that Sye might have guessed for heroics.

The salarian ran forward, scrawny arm coiled, and released a clumsy and utterly ineffective haymaker. At first, Spub seemed confused by the punch to the face, perhaps wondering when the force of it would arrive. Vorcha instincts took over. Abandon all other tasks when a brawl has been offered. He shoved Caleen aside and punched back. Charval, glass-jawed even by salarian standards, twirled around and collapsed.

The spectacle lacked glory, but it served to break the spell on the rest of them. Spub tried grabbing Caleen once more, but she recoiled. An instant later he was overcome by the rush of attackers that stormed forward. Ralik closed in fastest. The batarian's fist made up for what Charval's lacked. The punch connected and Spub reeled backward. Jocelyn and Louis attacked in tandem, Vallon not far behind. He fell to the ground. Several kicks followed, bludgeoning his midsection. He pivoted his body despite the onslaught and splayed his body out, attempting to clench his fangs around Jocelyn's ankle.

"No chance, beastly thing," said Zoreen in her native turian. Her foot slammed hard into Spub's neck.

Against two or three, Spub might have held his ground, but against the whole mob his chances became nil. The kicks and punches were clumsy, but the sheer number of them overcame any defense the vorcha had. His body slammed against one of the generators before he fell unconscious. It took another minute before the assault finally subsided. Zoreen picked up the unconscious Charval Potes and pinched a tendon under his shoulder, muttering observations about fragile salarians. The pain roused him to consciousness with a yelp and a wince. She checked the shadows of their trail to make sure the escapees had not acquired any further unwanted company.

Deciding he'd not want to recount the tale of this triumph without highlighting his own ferocity with some measure of honesty, Sye walked over and gave Spub one final kick in the gut. The kick was closer to gentle than ferocious in the grand scale of brawls, but his sense of bravado had been satisfied. "Okay, everyone ready to leave?"

His feet splashed in the puddles along the final tunnel. He opened the hatch and there, as promised, waited the vehicle.

Gursk tried not to laugh. Mechano-Man was the smartest man he knew. The nicest man. Mechano-Man gave him Abacus. Mechano-Man was his friend and he didn't say cruel things or punch long after the punching was no longer fun like other friends Gursk had in the past. But when the little volus ran the scene looked like a belligerent duck waddling off to war. Laughter was unavoidable.

Gursk cackled away until he remembered that the professor, always thinking ahead the way he was wont to do, might have good cause to run. Gursk sprang after, making two strides before the grenade blast sent him into the air. He landed hard on top of something large and round.

He pulled himself off the professor and called the name, "Mechano-Man" three or four times before accepting the fact that either the explosive, or the vorcha falling on him had rendered the professor unconscious.

It really was a small blast. Captain Foul hadn't lied. Barely worth running from. Roumba easily fired better explosives; the assault rifle, slung over his shoulder, looked sad, having yet found an opportunity to participate in the night's events.

It seemed a fine opportunity to finally peak under the pressure suit and see what volus really looked like. Supposedly, this was bad for volus health. Very strange. Gursk, fingered the seals, then his fingers twitched. So tempting to look, but why risk making Mechano-Man angry.

Rog had left behind a bottle of ryncol on a table at the far end of the room. It was a perfect bit of justice considering the jerk had stolen alcohol from Gursk on several occasions. That the bottle survived the grenade blast unblemished only proved that Gursk was destined to drink it. He'd wait until Mechano-Man was conscious and then they'd share.

First, he completed the sabotage (after Mechano-Man had failed, he thought proudly), and now he had a bottle they could drink together in celebration. Mechano-Man was going to be so pleased with him.

He made a mental checklist that he had not forgotten anything important to take away: Abacus under arm; Roumba over the shoulder, bottle in hand. He grabbed the volus' foot and dragged the volus body behind him. The list felt complete.

The wild barrage of noise had come to an end, the excitement missed. The ramp down to ground level was hidden in near total blackness. A shaft of emergency light offered guidance from the distance. He was about to head for the rendezvous by the shuttle pad when he heard groaning and cursing coming from the opposite doorway. Two separate voices. He had refrained from acting on curiosity once already, twice was wrong. Mechano-Man said curiosity was the sign of an active mind.

The processing room lay in in ruin, its ground transformed into cratered and jagged slopes. Toppled cooling units had disgorged chunks of ice that sat in slowly growing puddles that dripped into the crevices of uneven earth.

His eyes adapted to the meager illumination left intact. One of the ice drills had broken through its safety restraints and bore through three meters of ground and one hapless krogan. Exhaust hung low in the room, wafting in from Building-B.

The groan returned, lingering and barely audible. He scanned the room until he saw the source. Falindra leaned against the side of a conveyor belt, using it to slowly prop herself up. Kryts lay further right, his misshapen head centered in a halo of blood.

"Gursk, where have you been?" came the guttural voice that delivered the curses heard before. An unmistakable voice. A hated one. Drau Gorba stood under the intact ice drill, seething with fury. His asthmatic breath punctuated by hacked phlegm. "You stupid bug. Biggest fight and you slept through it. Hurx is dead because of you. You serve zero purpose. Now get….."

Drau Gorba stopped when he saw the absurd haul Gursk carried, then pieced together which direction the late arrival likely came from.

"Did you catch him in the security room? Is the volus the one that cut power? You couldn't stop one puny volus? Stupid, useless vermin."

A notion slowly formed in Gursk's mind, a mantra of sorts, repeating itself, gaining form, moving from mind to mouth.

He thought about his brothers and sisters who learned about his aversion to water and grew merciless in their rebukes.

He recalled the thousand times Skeb and Kryts made clear that in the pack of predators that lived in the station, Gursk was omega, the last and least. Gorba always spurred them on, established that the swarming and beatings kept the Dread Claw strong, weeded out the unfit. This was no philosophy, no desperate need being fulfilled, only a pretext for the pleasure of watching the sport. Gursk remembered the delectable taste Gorba had for watching the sadistic, the smile he wore while the other vorcha pummelled Gursk at the slightest urging. It's what fed Gorba's gluttony.

"Me not stupid," Gursk intoned.

Drau Gorba tilted his head. "What did you say?"

"Me not stupid! Me not stupid!" Gursk cried, the mantra becoming a wrathful spirit given birth by his voice. His mind became unshackled, liberated by an epiphany. The universe, in a fleeting moment, made sense, held together by the elegant beauty of mathematical law, and all possible revelations were awaiting his discovery of them.

The bottle of ryncol and Abacus fell to the floor. He let go of the professor. "Me not stupid!" He whipped Roumba into his hand and pointed. "Two times three is five!"

The Falcon assault rifle hummed. Gursk squeezed the trigger and the Falcon fired a grenade round. Christmas lights wrapped around the barrel flared gleefully in celebration of the unconventional joyous occasion. Two more explosive rounds shot out. Drau Gorba stood in stupefied horror, realizing his own foolishness for the first and only time.

The first landed at Gorba's feet. In fine display of newfound intellectual acuity, Gursk allowed the recoil to go wild on the successive rounds. They skipped into the plastic membrane that held the ice drill against the wall, and then detonated.

The membrane disintegrated in a small inferno of fire. Dangerous atmosphere invaded the habitat's air. The ice drill buckled with an awful groan and fell forward, pulling the wall down with it. A mechanical colossus dropping to its knees. Drau Gorba, for all his proclamations of strength, was unequal to the task of keeping twelve metric tons from crushing his body.

Gursk stood in wait, superstitious against assuming an easy victory. Once the dust settled, he saw a set of fat legs protruding from under the drill where it now lay. It would be just like the hateful Gorba to have stolen vorcha regenerative properties. Gursk fired two more grenade rounds at the broken body parts for good measure.

Gursk thought he knew what happiness meant, assumed the feeling, so common a thing, had been his as often as anyone's. Now he knew happiness that proved all previous impressions to be falsehoods. He was liberated. He felt free of a monster that had been haunting him a long time.

He savored the moment, breathing in the dangerous air.

After the moment had been given its proper reverence he collected his cargo. He slung the injured Captain Foul over one shoulder (against her protests). Roumba went over the other. Mechano-Man in right hand: check. Bottle in the left hand: check. Abacus under arm: check.

Satisfied that he remembered to gather everything of importance, Gursk proceeded through the antechamber and out the exit where escaped slaves awaited the trio in a commandeered ship.


	13. Chapter 13

Winds blasted sand into the exposed room. Drau Mar wondered how long before dunes covered the broken machinery.

Bodix had led the Dread Claw to victory against a band of turian mercenaries that operated an iridium mine twenty miles east. Nobody was left alive. It felt good to kill turians. He might pretend the satisfaction came from historical pride, a never ending vengeance for the genophage that the turians implemented centuries ago. The real reason was simpler. On their first encounter, Bodix was cocky and the disciplined opposition offered surprising, coordinated resistance, shaming the Dread Claw. It had to be answered. Avenged. Otherwise, the mercenaries would perceive Bodix's band as weak enemies and inevitably make an offensive of their own. It was krogan logic, but a logic that became unceasingly universal once feuds began.

Tactical movements won the second battle, clever flanking and lightning charges. Seventeen Dread Claw defeated turian forces that tripled them in numbers. Mar visualized one who fell to his shotgun. It was almost unsporting bringing a Claymore to a fight. One blast up close tended to end the fight before the target knew to react. He'd eliminated five of the turians himself, more than his share, he considered proudly.

Bodix left a small contingent to secure the iridium mine. The Dread Claw expanded their territory. They'd invite members of the Drau clan on Tuchanka to join them, fill the needed positions on both sites, and increase piracy, of course, all under the Dread Claw flag. The return journey saw them boisterous, spirited by triumph. They punched each other's shoulders and bragged about their kills.

That elation vanished once they saw the rubble that had been their source of independent income. The processing room, including both ice drills were in ruin. The security room and all its computer systems resembled a scrambled mess of circuit boards.

When they took stock of what happened, Bodix became an incarnate god of rampaging temper. He slew the surviving guards, pulverising them with an electric hammer. Rog squealed with animal horror when he realized the punishment in store. The squeal ended abruptly once it was delivered. Kin enjoyed no immunity; he crushed Loze's skull with a single, savage blow. Only Kryts was spared. The sight of a missing face, replaced by a bulbous growth of misshapen regenerating skin, proved he fought the good fight. Fates disapproved of executing anyone with the will to survive such an injury.

Mar had led the repair effort, cordoning off the salvageable rooms in Building A: the barracks, cafeteria, sensors control, and science lab. Processing was abandoned. Krogan were not known for their penchant for construction. If the millions of inhabitants of their home planet lacked the collective will to improve their home world's visage from that of garbage pile, it was no surprise that a small band of outlaws lacked the aptitude or desire to see through with the architectural repairs of one building.

Ironically, the damages improved their security, if they acquired new slaves. A toxic environment now divided the remaining sensitive facilities in Building A from Building B where the laborers were housed.

It might also help if they stopped acquiring asari commandos deluded with a sense of chivalry. They were about to learn the consequence of their failure. He stood beside Telx and Zugo, all of them unflinching against the biting sand that stung their faces. Their eyes followed the salarian Dark Hammer class cutter lower three landing struts, and complete its descent. .

Bodix stepped in front of the other krogan, ready to greet their employer's liaison. 'Guest' was too kind a word; it implied a semblance of fondness for the mercenary who arrived that the Dread Claw lacked. Mar's own urge for killing became inflamed at the visit from Baleron Kye. . Being salarian already made him deserve a good death blow. That he was suspiciously skilled in espionage and clandestine acts gave a second reason. Mere criminals did not possess that sort of training. Former STG operatives did.

There were too many people who warranted the grave.

He should have killed Falindra Deltos weeks ago, regardless of the employer's wishes. The very demand that she be kept alive was cause for suspicion. She fought two batarians in a vicious brawl that left her the only one standing seconds after it began. Then she averted disaster during the ice shield accident. All those indicators made him wary, apprehensive, and the blame was his own for not heeding his instincts and snapping her neck that night in the tunnels.

Then there was Bodix. If anyone deserved summary judgment and krogan justice it was their gang leader. Nobody in the Dread Claw mistook the two of them for being friends. Bodix was greedy and unwise, two qualities that led to costly mistakes, of late some of the costliest. He should have been deposed of long ago, his penchant for shifting blame long worn thin, save for one other quality that served him and the Drau together. He had vision. Bodix understood the world of commerce and trade that the Citadel races obsessed about, brokered deals with corporations and fledgling governments that transformed the Dread Claw from destitute pirates and outlaws into feared mercenaries. Mar might never lead his people into disasters, but he'd never lead them toward prosperity either. For this reason he kept his disdain for their commander, if not secret, at least at bay. The wealth generated by their operations on Yagi bought resources for the clan's homelands on Tuchanka. So long as that continued, he stayed his weapons. Mar had no head for trade that didn't involve an exchange of bullets.

Drau Bodix did not trust his compliance. When he approached the salarian vessel, stepping ahead of his retinue, his back stiffened, body ready to react to an attack from behind. Their loathing was mutual. Mar considered doing exactly what Bodix suspected. After all, how long before Bodix found an excuse to deliver upon him the same fate that Loze met?

The cutter's boarding ramp lowered and Baleron Kye descended. He wore his modified, crimson Colossus armor, carried his signature, self-assured posture, a dangerous smugness, a genteel facade, as though he might attend a socialite charity gala to start a brawl. Mar hated salarians, but he knew better than to underestimate this one.

A human woman followed on his left flank, stalky with a mop of red hair covering her shoulders. Baleron had always been a solitary operative. The unprecedented company sparked curiosity and Mar knew from an exchanged glance with Zugo that other krogan felt the same.

Bodix approached the two and shared perfunctory greetings before escorting them away from the shuttle pad. The assembled host journeyed the most direct route through the remnants of Building A, inevitably providing Baleron a detailed view of the ruin. They gingerly made their way across the cratered floor.

"I must say…." Baleron surveyed the destruction, a slight smile curling his lip. "You've certainly added the stamp of your people's decorative tastes." Bodix muttered obscure profanities that omni-tool translators failed to process.

The human captured Mar's attention during the walk. She squinted and rubbed her temples. The grimace of discomfort on her face was plain even to an observer from another species. Twice she nearly lost balance while they toured level ground, first in the antechamber, then once more when they finally reached the cafeteria.

Skeb closed the door. The room lacked proper hatches to prevent air contamination but their guests removed environmentally sealed helmets regardless.

"So!" Baleron sounded cheerful. "It seems you've hit a small snag. I'm only speculating."

Bodix growled, ready to lunge on their liaison right then. "Your Helium-3 operations are intact. Thanks to us, most of the local pirate bands are gone. There's not a single pirate base left within three thousand kilometers that poses a threat to your investments. So what are you worried about?"

The jovial façade Baleron carried vanished, replaced by a macabre devil face. "You're not that obtuse. You've reaped unmitigated disaster. You were asked to do two things. Let's make a checklist. One, maintain a low profile while guarding the helium-3 extractors." He counted his fingers. "Well, between the passenger ship hijackings and the vendettas you're sewed with half the governments and outlaw groups in the Caleston Rift, I'd say you've misinterpreted the definition of low profile.

"What was two? Oh yes, hold on to a captured asari commando until I arrive for retrieval. Well done." Baleron picked up a polypropylene dinner plate from the cafeteria table, curiously intact in contrast to the rundown condition of the surroundings. After making a cursory study, he dropped it to the floor and, without notice, took quick strides out of the room, beginning a tour of what remained salvageable throughout the compound, leaving his human companion and the Dread Claw to catch up.

His head swiveled exaggerated motions on his long neck while he made inspections. Judgmental utterances accompanied every examination.

Bodix put a meaty fist through one of the tables, as though its untarnished presence offended him, and exorcised the urge to throttle their visitor. He followed soon after, catching up with Baleron in the north tunnel of Building B. Mar and Telx followed.

"We'll catch her." Bodix shoved an arm out to block the salarian's passage, demanding full attention. "I fix my mistakes. She likely fled straight to Maitrum to find safety with turian authorities. I'll track her down."

"Catch her? You couldn't contain her when she was a defenceless captive. Think your odds improve once she regroups and rearms? You'll do nothing of the sort. You've completely bungled your obligations from top to bottom. You are not chasing Falindra Deltos. You are not repairing this habitat. You are not continuing your private war on this moon or piracy in the rest of Caleston Rift. You were paid handsomely for a glorified security detail and brought disaster because you tried collecting beer money on the side with your ice mining operation and your piracy."

Bodix gaped. He pivoted and lowered his hulking frame until his face met close with Baleron's. "What do you mean? We've been involved too long to leave now. How's are you going to protect this place without us?"

Baleron double backed and reopened the hatch into Building A, sweeping his arm across the panorama of the processing room to illustrate the effectiveness of the Dread Claw's stewardship so far.

"We're bringing in professionals." Baleron emphasized the last word with disdain. "Robo-miners for the helium-3 and an infantry detachment for garrison."

"We hit only the passenger ships we were told to. All chartered, nothing government and we left no survivors. Each one went perfect without escaped witnesses."

A flicker of the eyelid was all that betrayed Baleron's surprise; but Mar knew that the added defense was news. So he wasn't the trusted, all-knowing proxy of their employers. Deals had been made that explicitly left him beyond the fold. He had not been told about the ordered hijackings.

Baleron recovered from the surprise. "Be very clear how tenuous your employment and prospects are, Drau Bodix. Our employers are incensed. You've put their operations in jeopardy, and there are few uses left for you."

The liaison allowed a lingering pause to fill the silence. The only surprise for Mar was that Bodix had not yet killed the offensive salarian. Nearly any krogan would have by now after the series of insults that had been given. Either Bodix possessed vast reservoirs of hitherto untapped discipline, or he was receiving a much bigger cut of the Dread Claw's wage than he let on. The latter was the far more plausible explanation.

The human drew Mar's attention again. She groaned under the pressure of a headache, eyelids fluttering with muscle spasm. He'd seen that look before in humans, about a century back when they first started experimenting with biotics. Eager to match the asari in power, they bred mutants and crammed prototypes into their victims' skulls. It didn't end well for most of the recipients; it ended in insanity and brain tumors. The girl had that look, like an overcharged implant had been crammed into her noggin and now she was primed to go on a super-powered murder binge.

Baleron announced the sort of penance demanded for the Dread Claw to return to good graces with their employers. "We might have some use left for you, a chance to prove you're not a liability, where your skills are an advantage. Insurrectionists in the Maroon Sea are have become problematic. We led them to success and now they're straying from their role. Fear is needed to put them back in their place."

The two reviewed the changing conditions of employment, going over the details of supplies, cover stories if official Citadel governments became involved, and payments. After that, Baleron left them to make a detailed inspection of the helium-3 repositories orbiting Kobayashi. It was a brief visit.

Bodix made an about-face once the cutter flew off, staring hard at Mar, searching for signs of smug satisfaction. Drau Mar respected the position of leadership. Unless he planned to supplant their chief, it was irresponsible to publically undermine him. That didn't stop Bodix from being guarded against disparagement about his honor.

"Pleased," he asked.

Mar was silent.

Bodix invited Telx to follow him. "With me." It was not the first time he singled out the krogan with myriad studded piercings that lined his face and hands. An unsubtle indicator of whom he favored, who became his second-in-command now with Gorba dead, and who should be expected to fight on his side if someone attempted to usurp his tarnished crown.

Telx followed as requested. Mar also followed, noting that he explicitly had not been invited. He had no intention of being left out any schemes being hatched, particularly if Bodix was in a paranoid mood and decided to purge their band of anyone showing signs of disloyalty. If tensions came to that, Mar knew very well he'd be the first singled out.

Bodix stomped through the north tunnel and came to the door of cargo room one. He didn't knock or shove it open. He unslung his electric hammer and heaved it, almost lazily. The force of the blow unleashed a static wail that sent shivers down Mar's back and sent the door flying into the room.

Five humans inside scrambled to their feet. Two shouted in fright. Each one stared at the large, ferritic steel door that seemed to teleport to the opposite end of the room, appreciating the randomness of fortune and how quickly one of their lives might have been brought to a close if they had sat along that door's course.

Hastings shoved one of his companions aside to clear obstructions between him and the krogan leader. A layer of stubble dotted his jaw and his eyes were hollow, sunken. Dried puke sat in yellow-red splotches on the floor, mostly around where the door once had been during a frantic attempt to escape.

Mar was impressed that Hastings was ready to meet confrontation against a physically superior foe, particularly for someone looking in need of an infirmary before the fight started. His was a leadership the krogan recognized. No matter the odds against him, he'd still charge in. Any less was unforgivable weakness in front of those who followed him, led to being overthrown, most likely followed by a bullet in the head. He'd rather die 'spewing razors' as the old-timer Drau were fond of saying: letting people know exactly what you thought of them.

"Settle down, Hastings." Bodix tucked his weapon back in its holster. "I ain't killing you today. Not in the mood to clean your face off my hammer."

The krogan had left them stewing for five days, speculating about their fates. As far as Bodix was concerned, since they were not the guards who had failed him, they did not deserve execution. Instead, the grand arbiter who passed sentence with a two meter electric gavel pondered laboriously over whether killing for sport might lift his mood, or if some better use for them might be found.

Hastings body visibly relaxed. His crew were equally relieved; most of them sat back on their haunches still struggling against lingering nausea.

Bodix gave them an appraising look. "Any chance you'd be interested in some revenge against the woman who made a victim out of you, or are you too feeble now?"

Mar began to realize that Bodix had good reason to keep secret these humans' survival from Baleron Kye. Just when he was about to dismiss the chief as inexcusably stupid, a surprise bit of craftiness showed through.

Hastings' face twisted into something hateful that embellished every scar of a seedy past: the knife slash down his cheek, the burn mark that kept the tip of his right eyebrow from growing back.

"That asari bitch. You should have let us put the dead in her the moment she arrived and got uppity. Darn right I want a little justice." He looked to his crew, Jaqueline and Kazmer, Guang, and Carl. They all shared his volatile temperament on the subject. They all wanted her hurt a whole lot, and then wanted her dead.

"Point us where to go," Hastings finished with the tacit approval of his crew.

"Don't go trying to take her by yourselves. She'll have friends. Maybe police or military types. Track her down and let me know when you have. Then we'll both get to mete out some frontier justice."

Hastings slapped his palm to his thigh and allowed the echo to hang in the air, as though to withhold from committing an immediate slaughter was some monumental act of restraint and self-sacrifice that required deliberation. "Fine. We'll find whatever blue-whore town she skulked off to and give you a beep. You bludgeon and I'll stab. It'll be very sharing."

Bodix let out a gruff laugh. "Telx, open the armory to our friends."

"You're walking into a double-cross," came a voice from the shadowed recess of the reclamation enclosure once Bodix and Mar left the cargo room. Hastings and his gang weren't the only remaining occupants of the habitat that Bodix neglected to mention to Baleron.

"Why would Hastings' double-cross me?" asked Bodix.

A lean man stepped into view, Trez'Kailer. His bronze tinted, quarian environmental suit made him look like some armored phantasm. His footfalls were measured and he approached unflinching toward the towering krogan. Behind him, Bols approached gingerly. The last time such a short distance rested between him and the krogan chief he'd been beaten near to death. His batarian girth and height made the quarian look even smaller. In fact, Trez'Kailer was the shortest, skinniest, most fragile man in the habitat; but his approach carried the resolute determination of a missionary. It gave him strength.

"I'm talking about your employer."

"Eavesdropping, were you? Of course Baleron wants to betray us. It's what salarians do," said Bodix. He pressed his foot playfully against the bulbous form of an insect crawling along the ground until its torso burst. Milky residue streaked across his boot.

"I'm not just talking about him. The people financing this operation. They're going to lead you to your destruction and you're following along."

"Am I," said Bodix slowly.

The quarian was naïve if he didn't recognize that such a warning was also a veiled insult and close to getting him killed. Mar failed to grasp what reason the fool had for staying behind. It might make sense for the batarian, who made only enemies among the slaves, but not for the quarian.

"Drau Bodix, nobody has the means of acquiring the helium-3 extractors orbiting that gas giant above us without the backing of a powerful consortium. Citadel governments or corporations, take your pick. Once they're done, the last thing they'll want is to be associated with is krogan pirates"

Bodix scoffed. "Stuffy Citadel bellyachers hire krogan all the time for the work they're scared of."

"You haven't been bodyguards or bounty hunters. How many slaves have you captured from shuttle hijackings? How many of them perished? "

"Fool quarian. You got no spine. Worse belly-aching than a salarian. Why should I trust you more? Enjoyed your accommodations, here have you?" A thermal vent erupted over their heads, its over-worked fan creating a racket. The habitat was falling apart all around them. It might have seemed auspicious to happen on the tail of Bodix comment, illustrating the wretched conditions they lived in, except that such signs had grown commonplace.

"Maybe I am a spineless fool. I won't pretend to approve of how you've treated your captives, but I can appreciate what it is your people have suffered and what lengths are needed to improve their lot. Your clan looks to you as a hero. That's a burden. With the Citadel governments failing to help their own citizens with reconstruction, with restoring their lives, do you really thing they care about promises they made to the Drau? How much does it cost you to let me and Bols take my ship? I just need one of you to accompany Bols and me, someone who knows the ports in the Terminus."

Bodix mulled over the meaningless offer. The quarian was full of rhetoric, but he hardly possessed the means of investigating the people Baleron served. Mar wondered why it took any thought at all. He wanted to return to more important tasks like completing repairs to the power generators, or calibrating shuttle engines if the Dread Claw were to depart from Yagi. He lingered, sensing the conversation was about to reveal something he'd not want to miss. Trez'Kailer was either insincere or deluded and Bodix should have killed the fool for not fleeing with the others, instead he seemed to entertain the offer.

"You leave with one of mine. Bols stays," Bodix decided.

"No deal, I need him, too," said Trez to the surprise and relief of the large batarian. Everyone puzzled over what extortion or bribe occurred to warrant Trez championing the man at his side.

Bodix's temper flared. Negotiation was not the Drau custom, it implied weakness. A Drau chief did not negotiate. He dictated.

Trez interceded before Bodix reneged. "For that I'll guarantee you information on and aid against whoever put that energy refinery up in the sky. And I'll get details on the asari commando, too. More than Hastings ever will."

"Really?" Bodix spat on the ground, dubious about such a boast.

"I know the decryption patterns she uses."

Two vorcha scrambled past them, carrying oil stained rags, moving from one spill to the next, unqualified for the desperate base repairs they administered. The four men watched them scuttle along, except for Trez who kept focus on his benefactor.

"Fine." Bodix sneered satisfaction at the happy conclusion to a plot he'd been concocting. You're taking one of my best with you. I want to make sure you're more than meaningless promises." He extended an arm in Mar's direction. "I trust no one more than Mar to serve the Drau's interests. "

Mar recoiled in shock. It was an insult, an ambush. The Dread Claw were finally leaving behind the drudgery of garrison for real glory ahead and now he was being saddled with a man perpetually attached to a respirator. Of course Trez's promises were outlandish. The notion that he had access to illicit corporate data was absurd enough. Making claims about knowing how to hack asari commando cybernetic security – that was hustler salesmanship of the worst sort. Mar was more of a mind to kill him. Bodix should have been, too.

Then it donned on him that Bodix did not care either way what sort of offers and assurances Trez made. He had no interest all. His concern during the entire conversation was about Mar. He wanted to be rid of a detested lieutenant. The two never hid the animosity they felt toward one another. Bodix expected being attacked during a vulnerable moment, a rival claim for leadership. With the Dread Claw's ranks currently depleted, he could hardly slay the most successful stormtrooper in the pack, not without justification. Sending Mar on 'an important mission' that amounted to banishment, that seemed to fit his needs fine.

Bodix turned and faced Mar, the sneer still pressed on his mouth like a fleshy growth. "I'm sure you'll find glory, Mar."

Mar took his time packing. He gathered all his combat equipment: Claymore shotgun, Executioner Pistol, Bluewire, medi-gel. Proper maintenance demanded that each piece be scrutinized with the aid of a tool kit, especially after the hard use they received during the last raid. Discounting that Bodix hoped to see him never return, preferably due to dying on some unknown, ass-end planet in the Terminus, he still anticipated a lengthy time spent on this ridiculous chase with the quarian.

The Claymore lay in parts atop a worktable. He put his eye to the barrel, cleaned the inside with the special fitted wire brush. The mechanisms of the shotgun still meshed as needed. Connection sockets that linked it to his armor's power supply and omni tool's munition commands. They still read at full efficiency. Satisfied, he began reassembling the weapon before repeating a similar inspection with the Executioner.

If he took longer than needed, he hardly minded keeping Trez and Bols waiting. He gathered his personal possessions. Long trip or short, he likely would not be returning to Yagi. Keepsakes were few. Krogan rarely had the luxury of being sentimental, and fewer cared to try. It was particularly pointless in the ranks of the Dread Claw. Everyone knew that vorcha stole. Everyone with brains knew that other people stole and blamed it on vorcha.

He ventured toward the shuttle pad without planning good byes. With Hurx' death, the last of his kinsmen he'd call friends were gone. He reconsidered at the sight of Skeb near the door. The vorcha's voice was shrill and irritating. Snot perpetually hung from its nostril. Mar found little to like in the walking rodent save that in the worst, messiest, bloodiest fights Skeb was always reliable, always watched out for his partners.

"If Bodix ever offers bonuses to the man who storms the enemy stronghold first, then even he knows it's a suicide mission. Don't volunteer."

Skeb nodded, suspicion spread across his face and puzzlement for why he'd refuse an offer for extra money.

Stupid walking rat.

The wind outside had died. He walked toward the far end of the shuttle pad where Trez'Kailer and Bols waited by the boarding ramp of the salarian ship, both armed with donations from Bodix. They had fewer brains than the vorcha. Krogan were born to survive extreme conditions, harsh temperatures, even radiation exposure. Evolution had not been so generous in the creation of his two soon-to-be travelling companions. Trez might have limited protection in his sealed suit, but Bols had to be suffering in the outdoor exposure. Breathing the moon's unfiltered air would likely kill him if he lingered much longer.

Mar should have double checked his weapons.

"Welcome aboard," Trez greeted him. "Your kinsmen often speak of your skill in battle. It's an honor to have you join us".

"Funny, I don't remember paying for a sweet talking whore. Save your air supply." Mar noted that Trez' ship was the same model Baleron Kye kept. That the two men held similar tastes seemed like another bad omen. The vessel in front of them was, in true quarian fashion, heavily modified. Customized would be a generous descriptor, but jury-rigged seemed more accurate. He tried not thinking about the fact that it was marginally serviceable when Trez first arrived, and little improved with the quick repairs Trez made with Skeb's assistance.

"I never understood the krogan penchant for self-loathing." Trez tapped codes into a security panel that opened the ship's airlock. "How ingrained it must be that you that you mistake all praise as being disingenuous."

"Nobody swallowed your crazy claims, quarian. All this talk about protecting us from Citadel authorities, of getting us leverage against Shyamala Sura and Baleron, or the asari intelligence codes. Even Bodix isn't that stupid. He's having a chuckle watching you wander off to die and hopes I'm strapped in tight for the journey."

"The first two I ask you take on faith a little longer, but I don't see what's so impossible about the last one. Asari commandos are military combatants, not computer programmers. They're trained to use a handful of reliable, broad-use decryption and hacking protocols."

Mar found his patience fraying, which happened when people took him for an idiot. "Serrice Guard methods are so sophisticated you'd practically have to be riding the command with your own-omni-tool, analyzing in real-time, to use it for breaking their codes."

"A powerful point," Trez sighed and led them aboard.

"You look happy to see me," Mar said to Bols. The batarian had been stupefied for days, catching up to the vertigo of seeing all his fellow slaves flee, facing probable murder, learning that the male quarian clearly had a secret relationship with the pirates all this time, and now finding he was conscripted on a pointless mission. His life had become surreal.

The ship's interior had the austere polish of mausoleum sanctity. Even the parts repaired with salvage were neatly tucked under a veneer of containment plaster. A soft chorus of electronic hums slowly came to life as Trez activated start-up systems from the bridge.

"There are seventeen Vis onboard that assist me with operations and each one has coded command overrides. I suggest you allow me to do the piloting." He crawled into the communications alcove motioning for them to follow. He brought a data terminal to life with an illuminated blueprint of the vessel. His finger provided a tour of what could be found in different areas.

"Oh, there's one more thing I should show you." Squatting, he wedged open a slat from the wall, then another. Behind them rested a coiled knot of tubing that writhed like a cluster of metallic snakes, slyly cavorting. The mess began to uncoil, vomiting out onto the floor in a puddle of alloys, synthetic muscles, and plating that extended to form limbs and a body.

Mar and Bols stepped back simultaneously, shock driving their instincts toward defense. They pointed their weapons as the metal creature stretched and pulled itself to an erect position. It stood at their height, a reinforced body with metal worms for limbs. Its single bright eye stared unblinking.

"Creator Trez'Kailer. Asari programs used to control ship navigational systems on departed batarian vessel have been deciphered."

Trez turned toward Mar. "I ask you to have faith for just a little longer."


	14. Chapter 14

Falindra awoke in quarters larger than she experienced serving in the Asari Fleet. Officer's quarters. She'd woken up already, twice that she remembered, but the mental haze of pain combined with the drugs someone administered after scrounging through the vessel's infirmary made her groggy and uncertain about the details. Not knowing the time made her anxious, robbed her of one of the last instruments she used to measure how the universe unfolded. She always preferred knowing the time.

The omni-tool was still clasped around her wrist and powered up, orange and humming, upon command. She had difficulty thinking through the drugs well enough to navigate the holographic console of a machine she hadn't configured. It read 09:46:23 Caleston time.

Drin Haylar entered without knocking, his forest green environmental suit reflecting a cascade of tiny sparkles under the soft phosphorescence of the ceiling light. He carried a tray of gauze, scissors, and a bottle of opaque liquid. He stopped walking abruptly at the sight of her conscious and seated upright.

"Apologies. I came to apply ointments to your wounds and check your bandaging. Am I intruding?"

Falindra tried replying but her voice came out as a croak. Instead, she welcomed him in with a motion of her hand. He crossed the room purposefully, resting the tray on the bed beside her before pulling the collar of her shirt down to examine her shoulder.

"Charval applied excellent stitching from what I gather. There'll hardly be any scarring. You're lucky. It took convincing to keep Santina from doing the job."

"You're the acting medic now, professor" she managed, throat dry and voice hoarse.

It took Drin a few seconds to register what she said. "No. Actually, Muriel has been diligently taking up that function. But we're presently having a minor epidemic. Jocelyn carried onboard some human virus called a 'cold' that can jump species. The humans are all sneezing and the salarians have broken out with itchy rashes."

"Is it serious?" Falindra stretched her legs straight from where she sat, gingerly applying her own tests on the amount of pain simple movements caused. She had no intention of being bedridden.

Drin mistook the extension of her limbs as permission to work on her leg, rolling up the pants. He cut away some old, stained gauze on her right leg that had covered a nasty looking gash, and uncapped the bottle that he brought.

"The infirmary wasn't stocked with any general purpose medi-gel, but Muriel prescribed this zinc and antibiotic compound." He dabbed some on the wound, and applied a fresh wrapping of cloth. "No, it's nothing serious. They'll all be fine. How are you feeling?"

"Well enough."

"Sye petitioned to apply the ointments on your skin. If you feel he'd make a better nurse –"

"No, you're doing a fine job," her words pounced out with more energy than she intended, or even thought she was able to muster.

She tried inhaling a deep breath, but the cracked ribs from Drau Gorba's attack sent a stab of pain across her chest. Wincing, she tried again with smaller breaths, forcing her body to relax, make the tension ebb away. "Congratulations. Seems you completed your first commando mission"

He stopped checking her wounds. More than ever before, in that moment of stillness, she wished that his face was available to read, gauge the thoughts and emotions revealed in a person's eyes, around the curve of the mouth.

"You rescued me. You rescued almost every slave. They made it here unharmed. You did everything you promised. I don't know if I had difficulty believing you or the possibility of it, but somehow I'm still finding it difficult to believe. And you had no reason to rescue the others." He found the words awkward, an expression of gratitude that words failed to express in scope.

"It was my duty to help the others if I could. If you and I escaped, Bodix would have killed the others. Soldiers are trained if something unavoidable happens in a fight, but the Serrice Guard doesn't make a routine of sacrificing people." With a mixture of modesty and refusal to be waited upon, Falindra began cutting strips of gauze to apply ointments on the wounds covering her torso and upper thighs herself. "There's a turian colony not too far, Maitrum. It's in the Talava System. We'll drop the others off there."

Drin stopped applying the lotion abruptly. "Really? We'll drop them off. On Maitrum." The timbre of irritation in his voice was unmistakable. His suit's respirator made loud, punctuated clicks the way it only did when his patience wore thin.

"Um, yes." She hesitated, uncertain if her aching body and dazed head caused her to overlook some obvious concern.

"Are you well enough to walk?" He held his hand out to support her in the effort of pulling her body out of the bed.

Moments ago she felt determined to recuperate as soon as possible. The idea of being incapacitated was abhorrent. Now, a childish part of her considered a brief moment of feigning even greater pain than she already suffered.

She took his hand and allowed herself to be led away.

The batarian vessel stank of the sweat and grime one might expect from a ship that likely once carried slaves, though its current occupants might as easily be to blame. Offensive chemicals in the air made the odor worse. The ship was messy, the floors stained. In short, the bleak, grey interior seemed like little improvement over the dungeon they'd left behind.

The corridors possessed an alien design, the layout fundamentally different from asari design principles. Crew quarters were at the bow and bilge where she expected to find navigational computers. Drin escorted her one deck up deeper into the interior where they found the mess hall.

The entire collection of evacuees she'd secured the freedom of lay strewn about, some sitting slovenly in available chairs, on the ground when no formal seats were left, propping their heads up against the walls. Louis lay prostrate on the floor under the dining table. Muriel hovered about, applying a soothing gel on a few of the salarians. Charval's yellowish face had turned pink like some boiled crustacean. He moaned relief as Muriel dabbed at the rash. Kenji seated across, sniffed and wiped a torn strip of cloth across his nose. Only Sye and Ralik were missing, presumably piloting the ship. The rest of them were cloistered in the mess. If they'd felt any euphoria or joy for their unexpected liberation, Falindra had slept through the celebration. They looked much like they had before: weary, sick, thin with hunger, miserable. The only difference were that their faces, once sallow and blank, their carriers resigned to bleak fates, now showed the furtive marks of worry.

Lonwabo saw the two new arrivals enter and nudged Caleen who sat nearest. Soon, they all fixed their eyes on Falindra. A surge of stage fright suddenly swept through her.

"See," said Drin. "Your duty has been fulfilled. Everything for them is good now." He pulled her by the hand back into the corridor, which she considered a small mercy, if only to be away from their expectant stares.

"I'm sure they'll be ecstatic when you take them to Maitrum," Drin's voice had the gravity of an orator.

She stammered, trying to understand how she failed him, how in all her efforts she'd in the end committed some inexcusable wrong.

"Most of the people in that room were wayward settlers. Each one of them can tell you about the ruins of a home left behind. Pick your story. A family wiped out by the Reapers. Poverty and no skills for employment in the 'new economy'. Drafted into an ill-conceived government reconstruction program. Scavenging. Lulled into colonial drives with false promises. Why else do you think they risked coming into the remote regions far from the major Citadel worlds. Their lives were desperate even before the Dread Claw abducted them.

"They have no money, no loved ones, and no security. You're going to dump them on Maitrum, a turian penal world. And you think you've rescued them?"

Falindra shut her eyes with shame. Had she been so thoughtless as to presume that fulfilling her honor equalled some happy resolution for the Dread Claw's victims? She fought a battle and that had somehow wrapped her time with them in a nice, finished package. She'd send them on their way.

"What should I do," she pleaded. She felt exhausted. Sore. Weary of operating without a team, without leadership or counsel.

'Please," Drin said, motioning her back into the mess hall, his voice still purposefully deep, the irritation had been replaced by a strange mixture of optimism and salesmanship.

They looked once more upon the room's hapless occupants. Drin slowly spread his arm in a wide arc to take them all in. "I know how fond you were of your life in the navy, aboard the Nefrane. It sounds like your calling was found in such service. Captain Falindra," he gave weight to the rank. "Meet your new crew."


End file.
